About

Beth Lew-Williams is a Professor of History and the Director of the Program in Asian American Studies at Princeton University. Her research focuses on Asian American history, ethnic studies, migration and borders, gender and sexuality, violence, and the history of the U.S. West. Her first book, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America, maps the relationships between local racial violence, federal immigration policy, and U.S. imperial ambitions in Asia, and has received multiple awards including the Ray Allen Billington Prize and the Ellis W. Halley Prize. Her second book, John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life under American Racial Law, supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, explores anti-Chinese discrimination beyond federal exclusion and highlights stories of resistance; it has won the Bancroft Prize, the David J. Langum Sr. Prize in American Legal History, and the Merle Curti Social History Award. Lew-Williams earned her A.B. from Brown University and her Ph.D. in History from Stanford University. Her teaching has been recognized with the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award, and she was elected to the Society of American Historians. In 2025, she received the Dan David Prize for the study of the human past.

Research topics

• History
• Political science
• Sociology
• Law
• Computer science

Selected publications

• The Historical Paths to and from <i>Wong Kim Ark</i> – CORRIGENDUM

  Modern American History · 2026-02-24

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Historical Paths to and from <i>Wong Kim Ark</i>

  Modern American History · 2025-11-01 · 1 citations

  article

  Birthright citizenship, as a common law principle, was a cornerstone of the American Republic at its founding. 1 Like many “universal” rights at the time, it was presumed to apply to white people, routinely denied to enslaved people, and deeply contested for free people of color. After the Civil War, amid the effort to rebuild a fractured Union and answer the decades-long Black freedom struggle, Congress sought to affirm and extend the principle of birthright citizenship in the U.S. Constitution. In 1868, Congress recognized the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, extending citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil. The language of the Fourteenth Amendment was clear: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” 2 This included—as the congressional record reveals—the children of immigrants regardless of race, nationality, or desirability of their parents. 3

  PublisherDOI

• The Meaning of Alienage for Wong Kim Ark

  Modern American History · 2025-11-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  When Congress debated the wording of the Fourteenth Amendment, Chinese immigration was not at the forefront of legislators’ minds. They were primarily focused on granting citizenship to newly emancipated Black people while continuing to deny it to Native people living outside of America’s jurisdiction. Their ultimate choice of words reflected these desires. The first sentence of the amendment proclaimed, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” 1

  PublisherDOI

• Global narratives of the immigrant

  2024-01-01

  otherSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Chinese Naturalization, Voting, and Other Impossible Acts

  The Journal of the Civil War Era · 2023-11-21 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract: Historians have taken as a defining characteristic of Chinese experience in the United States their inability to naturalize until the repeal of Chinese Exclusion in 1943. It is certainly true that treaty agreements, court rulings, and discriminatory legislation conspired to prevent the existence of Chinese American citizens. But scholars may have taken for granted Chinese migrants' alien status and disenfranchisement more than they themselves did. In 1900, the US census recorded that 6.7 percent of the Chinese population had naturalized. These naturalized Chinese accomplished a seemingly impossible task and in so doing they exposed broader truths about the uncertain nature of citizenship in the postbellum era.

  PublisherDOI

• The Downfall of Asian Exclusion

  Diplomatic History · 2021-06-22

  article1st authorCorresponding

  When I teach Asian American history, my students sometimes complain of whiplash. For the first half of the semester, we slowly piece together the rise of Asian exclusion: how migration, imperialism, racism, and exploitation slowly led to the restriction of Chinese (1882), then Japanese and Koreans (1908), South Asians (1917), and finally Filipinos (1934). For Asian migrants in the United States, the process of exclusion touched and distorted all aspects of life. My students come to see how the shared experience of exclusion binds together the history of this diverse community. Then my students go away on fall break, and when they return the exclusion regime suddenly comes crashing down. First the Chinese (1943), then Indians and Filipinos (1946), then all Asians (1952) are allowed entry and the ability to naturalize. The rate of migration from Asia grows exponentially from there. In Opening the Gates to Asia, Jane H....

  PublisherDOI

• Paper Lives of Chinese Migrants and the History of the Undocumented

  Modern American History · 2021-05-18 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Historians know a great deal more about the laws and policies that first created unauthorized status than the people who had to live within these constraints. What if we tell the history of the undocumented as a history of a people, rather than a history of a state-constructed category? Scholars have noted that unauthorized status exerts broad effects on the conditions of migrants’ everyday lives, but they have focused primarily on Latinx migrants in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The case of unauthorized migrants produced by the Chinese exclusion laws (1882–1943) demonstrates how the study of the undocumented must begin a century earlier. In order to denaturalize the conditions of the present, we must interrogate the shifting nature of undocumented life in the past.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Chinese Must Go: Vio lence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (2018)

  Harvard University Press eBooks · 2020-12-15 · 38 citations

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In 1882, the United States launched an unprecedented experiment in federal border control...which promptly failed. The Chinese Must Go examines this formative moment when America's lackluster attempt to bar Chinese workers provoked a wave of anti-Chinese violence across the U.S. West. In 1885 and 1886, white vigilantes in over 150 communities used intimidation, harassment, bombs, arson, assault, and murder to drive out their Chinese neighbors. This little-known outbreak of racial violence had profound consequences. Displacing tens of thousands of Chinese immigrants, the expulsions reshaped America's racial geography. In response, the federal government not only overhauled U.S. immigration law, but also transformed its diplomatic relations with China. The Chinese Must Go recasts the history of Chinese exclusion and its importance for modern America. During a period better known for the invention of the modern citizen, the Chinese in America defined what it meant to be an alien. The significance of the "heathen Chinaman" on American law and society far outlived him....

  PublisherDOI

• Chapter 20. The Remarkable Life of a Sometime Railroad Worker

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2020-09-09

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Epilogue. The Modern American Alien

  Harvard University Press eBooks · 2018-08-08

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• T.S. Hamilton

  University of Massachusetts Amherst

  1 shared

• Kathleen Belew

  1 shared

• Jane Park

  1 shared

• Simeon Man

  1 shared

• Douglas S. Massey

  Princeton University

  1 shared

• Rudy P. Guevarra

  1 shared

• LeiLani Nishime

  University of Washington

  1 shared

• Leah Platt Boustan

  Princeton University

  1 shared

Labs

• Beth Lew-Williams LabPI

Awards & honors

• Ray Allen Billington Prize
• Ellis W. Halley Prize from the Organization of American Hist…
• Sally and Ken Owens Prize
• Vincent P. DeSantis Prize
• Caroline Bancroft History Prize