Mae Ngai

Mae M. Ngai, Professor of History and Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies, is a U.S. legal and political historian interested in questions of immigration, citizenship, and nationalism. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia in 1998 and taught at the University of Chicago before returning to Columbia in 2006. Ngai is author of Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton 2004) and The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2010). She has held fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Institute for Advanced Study. Before becoming a historian Ngai was a labor-union organizer and educator in New York City for District 65-UAW and the Consortium for Worker Education.