Beth Lew-Williams

Beth Lew-Williams 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, forthcoming 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 is also a contributor to the Chinese Railroad Workers in North American Project(link is external) at Stanford University. This transnational collaborative effort seeks to give voice to the Chinese migrants who built the transcontinental railroad and transformed the U.S. West.

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.

Her teaching interests include Asian American studies, ethnic studies, migration studies, and the history of the U.S. West.