About

Mary Lui is a Professor of American Studies and History at Yale University. Her primary research interests include Asian American history, urban history, women and gender studies, and public history. She is the author of The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York City, which was awarded the best book prize for history from the Association of Asian American Studies in 2007. Her work uses historical cases to examine race, gender, and interracial sexual relations within the cultural, social, and spatial formation of New York City Chinatown from 1870 to 1920. Her current research focuses on the transnational cultural history of Asian Americans during the early Cold War period, specifically from 1945 to 1965. She is working on a book project titled Making Model Minorities: Asian Americans, Race, and Citizenship in Cold War America at Home and Abroad, which explores the history of Asian American and U.S. cultural diplomacy in Asia during this time. Additionally, she is a principal collaborator on the Asian Americans and STEM initiative at Yale, working alongside colleagues in computer science and physics and astronomy. She has also co-published research on the history of Chinese mathematics translation programs during the Cold War.

Research topics

• History
• Computer Science
• Biology
• Engineering physics
• Engineering
• Archaeology
• Art

Selected publications

• Gary Y. Okihiro and Asian American Studies

  Journal of Asian American Studies · 2025-02-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  figure in the field of Asian American studies, passed away on May 20, 2024.It would not be hyperbolic to say that every one of us in the field knew Gary in some capacity-as an author, teacher, mentor, colleague, and friend.He was a senior colleague who seemed to be everywhere.It was hard to keep up with his prodigious list of publications.How in the world did he manage to publish so many books, well into his seventies?His wide smile, distinctive laughter, Hawaiian shirts (in the old days), and New York black suits (since the makeover) were reliably present at our annual conferences.To many of us in our relatively young field, born out of revolutionary dreams for new ways to produce collective knowledge, Gary was our beacon, our anchor.His imprint is all over our field.And then, all of a sudden, he left us.Born in 1945 and raised on a sugar plantation in Hawai'i, where his Japanese and Okinawan ancestors had worked, Gary used his humble background to guide his scholarship.When an undergraduate mentor told him that he would never be allowed to pastor a white church, he decided to shift his studies from theology to history.(On

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Global Routes and Hidden Labor in the American Mathematical Society’s Cold War Chinese Mathematics Translation Program

  Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences · 2024-06-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article argues that the first important comprehensive efforts by US mathematicians to survey, translate, and disseminate the work of Chinese mathematicians resulted from Cold War geopolitical and scientific competition and economic pressures that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. The success of the American Mathematical Society’s (AMS) translation program and its journal Chinese Mathematics depended less on official diplomatic channels and more on an informal network of Chinese American mathematicians and librarians in the United States, which provided the infrastructure and hidden labor necessary for transnational mathematical exchange and translation. The history of the Chinese translation project demonstrates the importance of moving beyond the biographies and work of established mathematicians to capture the broader transpacific social history of Chinese American mathematical research and technical labor in the early Cold War. Moreover, the article demonstrates the importance of bringing Asian American history and the history of Cold War science together, as the mathematical and linguistic expertise and labor required came from recently immigrated Chinese American mathematicians caught at the nexus of Cold War anticommunist politics and the incomplete repeal of Chinese exclusion. Historians of mathematics have mostly narrated the late 1940s and early 1950s as a time of anti-communist purges that impacted the lives of Chinese scientists and derailed US–China scientific exchange. Meanwhile, the 1960s have remained unexamined. Instead, we see the ways in which the AMS’s translation program generated important mathematical exchanges that widely impacted mathematics and adjacent fields.

  PublisherDOI

• The Chinatown Trunk Mystery

  2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • History
  • Archaeology
  • Biology
  PublisherDOI

• ten Sammy Lee

  Duke University Press eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art
  • History
  PublisherDOI

• Introduction to the Special Section

  Journal of Scholarly Publishing · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Engineering
  PublisherDOI

• Fifty Years of <i>JSP</i>: Golden Anniversary Compilation, compiled and edited by Mary Lui and Robert Brown

  Journal of Scholarly Publishing · 2019-10-01 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author

  The first issue of Scholarly Publishing came out in October 1969. Now, in October 2019, the Journal of Scholarly Publishing celebrates fifty years of quarterly publication by the University of Toronto Press. To mark the journal’s golden anniversary, this compilation features reminiscences written by contributors to JSP, covers from its back issues, and lists of its past editors and its twenty most-cited articles from 2004 to 2019.

  PublisherDOI

• Fentanyl: Heroin Yielding to a Deadlier Street Cousin

  The Internet Journal of Public Health · 2018-03-09

  article
  Publisher

• Interracial Sex, Marriage, and the Nation

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2018-09-07

  book1st authorCorresponding

  This article traces the long history of legal regulations around interracial sex and marriage as tied to important changes in the territorial consolidation and political formation of the American nation and its polity. These regulations stabilized ambiguous racial categories and gender roles as well as patriarchy and heteronormativity. The article begins in the colonial era to survey the range of local practices of interracial sex, marriage, and family formation that took place across different imperial contexts across the North American continent and moves into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the United States spanned the continent and pursued its own imperial ambitions globally. In addition, the article chronicles histories of resistance and mixed-race family formation that both challenged and worked within the limits of the law.

  PublisherDOI

• Sammy Lee

  2014-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Southeast Asia. Cultures at war: The Cold War and cultural expression in Southeast Asia. Edited by Tony Day and Maya H.T. Liem. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2010. Pp. 287. Plates, Notes.

  Journal of Southeast Asian Studies · 2013-04-22

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Southeast Asia. Cultures at war: The Cold War and cultural expression in Southeast Asia. Edited by Tony Day and Maya H.T. Liem. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2010. Pp. 287. Plates, Notes. - Volume 44 Issue 2

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Robert L. Brown

  Manaaki Whenua – Landcare Research

  2 shared

• Kevin M. Cooney

  Shriners Hospitals for Children - Erie

  1 shared

• Stephen K. Donovan

  1 shared

• Sanford G. Thatcher

  1 shared

• Peter A. Clark

  University of East Anglia

  1 shared

• Alex Holzman

  Temple University

  1 shared

• Rosemary Shipton

  1 shared

• Theodore Kim

  Yale University

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• 2007 best book prize for history from the Association of Asi…