Mai Ngai

Mae M. Ngai is a professor of history at Columbia University, who focuses on nationalism, citizenship, ethnicity, and in 20th-century United States history.

Life, education and career

Ngai writes that "as the daughter of Chinese immigrants, grew up in a home where being in Chinese and being American existed in tension, but not in contradiction", and spent "not a few years in New York's Chinatown community and labor movement as an activist and professional labor educator" before becoming an academic.

Ngai obtained her bachelor's degree from Empire State College, and obtained her PhD from Columbia University in 1998.

After graduation, Ngai obtained postdoctoral fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the New York University School of Law, and, in 2003, the Radcliffe Institute.

Published work

Ngai's first book, ''Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America'', was published by Princeton University Press in 2004. The book won several prizes, including the American Historical Association's 2004 Littleton-Griswold Prize, the Immigration and Ethnic History Society's 2004 Theodore Saloutos Book Award, and the Organization of American Historians' 2005 Frederick Jackson Turner Award. The book discusses the creation of the legal category of an "illegal alien" in the early 20th century, and its social and historical consequences and context.

Besides publishing in various academic journals, Ngai has written on immigration and related policy for the ''Washington Post'', the ''New York Times'', the ''Los Angeles Times'', ''The Nation'', and the ''Boston Review''.