ACADEMIC COUNCIL

IHI's Academic Council is a community of scholars and academics committed to bringing Asian American and migration history to new audiences and communities. They serve as advisors to IHI’s pedagogy, programming, collaboration, and resource and content creation.   

Erika Lee

Erika Lee is a Regents Professor of History and Asian American Studies, a Distinguished McKnight University Professor, the Rudolph J. Vecoli Chair in Immigration History, and Director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota. Recently elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, she is the President-Elect of the Organization of American Historians and the author of four award-winning books in U.S. immigration and Asian American history: At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943 (University of North Carolina Press, 2003), Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America (co-authored with Judy Yung, Oxford University Press, 2010), and The Making of Asian America: A History (Simon & Schuster, 2015, 2nd ed., 2016, Chinese version, 2019). Lee’s newest book, America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States (Basic Books, 2019) has been called “unflinching and powerful” by Carol Anderson (author of White Rage) and “essential reading” by Ibram X. Kendi (author of How to Be an Antiracist). 

Mae Ngai

Mae M. Ngai is Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History, and Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race. She  is a U.S. legal and political historian interested in the histories of immigration, citizenship, nationalism, and the Chinese diaspora.  She 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); and The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics (2021).  Ngai has written on immigration history and policy for the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the Atlantic, the Nation, and Dissent. Before becoming a historian she was a labor-union organizer and educator in New York City, working for District 65-UAW and the Consortium for Worker Education. She is now writing Nation of Immigrants: A Short History of an Idea (under contract with Princeton University Press). 

​

Jack Tchen

Jack (John Kuo Wei) Tchen is a historian, curator, and writer devoted to anti-racist, anti-colonialist democratic participatory storytelling, scholarship, and opening up archives, museums, organizations, and classroom spaces to the stories and realities of those excluded and deemed “unfit” in master narratives. Professor Tchen has been honored to be the Inaugural Clement A Price Chair of Public History & Humanities at Rutgers University – Newark and Director of the Clement Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture & the Modern Experience, since Fall 2018. Most recently, he is engaged with global warming crisis, eco justice, and the deep history of the region, founding the Public History Project (PHP), funded by the Ford Foundation. His most recent book – Yellow Peril: An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear (2014) is a critical archival study of images, excerpts and essays on the history and contemporary impact of paranoia and xenophobia. In 1996, he founded the A/P/A (Asian/Pacific /American) Studies Program and Institute, and research collections, New York University, NYU where he worked closely with Jack G. Shaheen and brought in his research collection on anti-Arab representations in television and Hollywood. In 1980, he co-founded the Museum of Chinese in America.
​

​

Andy Urban

Andy Urban is a historian of migration, labor, consumerism, and empire. His book, Brokering Servitude: Migration and the Politics of Domestic Labor during the Long Nineteenth Century (NYU Press, 2018), examines the cultural and political debates that surrounded the commodification of domestic labor in the United States, and attempts to regulate markets for the hire of household servants. As a teacher and practitioner of the digital and public humanities, Andy has been involved in a number of curatorial projects at Rutgers. His exhibit, Chinese Exclusion in New Jersey: Immigration Law in the Past and Present, curated with Rutgers undergraduates in an immigration history course, uses original records from the National Archives to examine how restrictive policies had an impact on Chinese communities in New Jersey. Most recently, Andy worked with the Rutgers Libraries and the New Jersey Digital Highway to curate the digital exhibition: “Invisible Restraints: Life and Labor at Seabrook Farms,” which was completed as part of the States of Incarceration project organized by the Humanities Action Lab.  Peer-reviewed articles Andy has written have appeared in the Journal of Asian American Studies, Journal of American Ethnic History, Journal of Policy History, Gender and History, and American Studies, and can be found on his website: andyturban.org.

Jason Chang

After finishing my PhD from the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California at Berkeley in 2010, I lectured in Asian American and Latin American history at the University of Texas at Austin. I also hold a Masters of Public Policy and Administration from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Combining Asian American Studies and Latin American Studies, I have worked with colleagues in these related fields to push to bring together Ethnic Studies and Area Studies that attends to both the transnational features of Asian diasporas in the Americas and the importance of local, regional, and national frames of analysis. My first book, Chino: Anti-Chinese Racism in Mexico, 1880-1940 (University of Illinois Press, 2017), analyzes the regional histories of Chinese migration and integration in Mexican society to show how the racial image of the Chinese shifted over the course of the 1910 revolution and subsequent reconstruction. ​My second project expands my interests in transnational Asian American history in several ways. My recent article in the Pacific Historical Review, “Four Centuries of Imperial Succession in the Comprador Pacific" traces the role of Chinese merchants across successive imperial regimes in the Pacific. 

Lisa Lowe

Lisa Lowe received her B.A. in History from Stanford University, and her Ph.D. in Literature from University of California, Santa Cruz. An interdisciplinary scholar whose work is concerned with the analysis of race, immigration, capitalism, and colonialism, she is the author of Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Cornell University Press, 1991), Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Duke University Press, 1996), and The Intimacies of Four Continents (Duke University Press, 2015), and the co-editor of The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Duke University Press, 1997) and New Questions, New Formations: Asian American Studies, a special issue of positions: east asia cultures critique 5:2 (Fall 1997). Before joining Yale, Lowe taught at the University of California, San Diego and Tufts University. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Mellon Foundations, the School of Advanced Study at the University of London, the UC Humanities Research Institute, and the American Council of Learned Societies.

​

Kornel Chang

Kornel Chang is Associate Professor of History and American Studies at Rutgers University-Newark. His research and teaching interests include Asian American history, the United States in the Pacific world, and race, migration, and labor in the Americas. His current book project, tentatively titled Occupying Knowledge: Expertise, Technocracy, and De-Colonization in the U.S. Occupation of Korea, examines the role of technocrats and expert knowledge in the U.S. occupation of Korea.

TBD

Description