Participant Info
- First Name
- Beth
- Last Name
- Lew-Williams
- Country
- United States
- State
- NJ New Jersey
- bethlw@princeton.edu
- Affiliation
- Princeton University
- Website URL
- https://history.princeton.edu/people/beth-lew-williams
- Keywords
- Migration, Immigration, U.S. West, 19th century, Race, Ethnicity, Asian American, Chinese America, Exclusion, Borders, Border Control
- Availability
- Media Contact
- Additional Contact Information
- PhD
- PhD
Personal Info
- Photo
- About Me
Beth Lew-Williams is Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University. She is a historian of race and migration in the United States, specializing in Asian American history. Her current project examines the role of Chinese migration and anti-Chinese violence in the making of the modern American alien. Her manuscript, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion and the Making of the Alien in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), offers a new history of Chinese Exclusion that maps the tangled relationships between local racial violence, federal immigration policy, and U.S. imperial ambitions in Asia.
Lew-Williams earned her A.B. from Brown University and Ph.D. in history from Stanford University. She has held fellowships from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the George P. Shultz Fellowship in Canadian Studies. She has been in residence at UW-Madison’s Institute for Research in the Humanities and the Institute for Advanced Study. Before coming to Princeton in 2014, she was an ACLS New Faculty Fellow at Northwestern University appointed in History and Asian American Studies.
- Recent Publications
The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion and the Making of the Alien in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018)
“‘Chinamen’ and ‘Delinquent Girls’: Intimacy, Exclusion and a Search for California’s Color Line,” Journal of American History (December 2017).
“Before Restriction Became Exclusion: America’s Experiment in Diplomatic Immigration Control,” Pacific Historical Review 83, no. 1 (February 2014): 24-56.
- Media Coverage
- https://slate.com/culture/2018/04/the-chinese-must-go-by-beth-lew-williams-reviewed.html
- Social Media
- @BethLewWilliams
- Country Focus
- USA
- Expertise by Geography
- United States
- Expertise by Chronology
- 19th century
- Expertise by Topic
- Diplomacy, Law, Migration & Immigration, Politics, Race
