Mae M. Ngai is Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History, and Codirector of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (2018-2023) at Columbia University. She received her PhD from Columbia in 1998 and taught at the University of Chicago before returning to Columbia in 2007. She is a U.S. legal and political historian interested in questions of immigration, citizenship, and nationalism. Ngai is author of the award-winning Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America )2004); The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America (2010); The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics (2021), which won the 2022 Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for the LA Times book prize in history and shortlisted for the Cundill Prize; and is editor of Corky Lee’s Asian America: Fifty Years of Photographic Justice (2024).
