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).

Ngai is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Society of American Historians. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Radcliffe Fellow, and a Kluge Chair at the Library of Congress, and also has received fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the NY Public Library, and the Russell Sage Foundation, among others. She has written on immigration history and policy for the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the Atlantic, and the Nation. Before becoming a historian she was a labor-union organizer and educator in New York City. She is now writing Nation of Immigrants: A Short History of an Idea.