Mae Ngai

Mae Ngai
Residence	New York City
Citizenship	United States
Alma mater	Columbia University
Awards	Frederick Jackson Turner Award
Scientific career
Fields	American history
Institutions	Columbia University
Doctoral advisor	Eric Foner

Mae M. Ngai is an American historian and Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History at Columbia University. She focuses on nationalism, citizenship, ethnicity, and race in 20th-century United States history.

Ngai writes that "as the daughter of Chinese immigrants, [she] 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.

She graduated from Empire State College with a BA, from Columbia University with a M.A. in 1993, and Ph.D. in 1998, where she wrote her dissertation under Eric Foner.

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. She taught at the University of Chicago as an associate professor, before returning to Columbia as a full professor in 2006.

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.

Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America discusses the creation of the legal category of an "illegal alien" in the early 20th century, and its social and historical consequences and context.

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