Beth Lew-Williams is a professor of history and the director of the Program in Asian American Studies. She is the author of The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (2018) and most recently, John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life under American Racial Law (2025), which won the 2026 Bancroft Prize. The book, which was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, draws on archives across the U.S. West to reveal the depth of anti-Chinese discrimination beyond federal exclusion.
She will serve as an Old Dominion Research Professor in the Humanities Council for 2026-27. She will work on The Development of American Alienage, 1776-2026, a book-length history of alienage in the United States, which will trace the development of the socio-legal status over the past 250 years.
Read her full biography on the Department of History website.
