John T. Holden Lecture: Mae Ngai

Tuesday, April 04, 2023 - 5 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.

Hamilton Smith Hall, Room 210


The annual John T. Holden Lecture in the College of Liberal Arts, will be delivered by Mae Ngai: "Shocking but not Surprising: Origins of anti-Asian racism in the U.S.”

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 at Columbia University. 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).

The Holden Lecture is supported by the John T. Holden Memorial Fund in the College of Liberal Arts, which was established in 1995 in memory of John Holden, one of the university’s outstanding teachers of political science, who served that department for 25 years, many as chair. The fund is dedicated to bringing signal scholars in the social sciences to UNH.

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