Mary Ting Yi Lui

Professor of American Studies and of History, and of Ethnicity, Race & Migration

Professor Mary Ting Yi Lui is Professor of American Studies and History. Her research and teaching focuses on Asian American history, urban history, women and gender studies, and public history. Her first book, The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York City, was awarded a 2007 best book prize for history from the Association of Asian American Studies. She recently appeared in a documentary film on the history of Chinese Exclusion Act directed by acclaimed filmmakers Ric Burns and Li-Shin Yu that aired on PBS’s American Experience in May 2018. She is currently working on a new book titled, Making Model Minorities: Asian Americans, Race, and Citizenship in Cold War America at Home and Abroad, that examines the history of Asian American and U.S. cultural diplomacy in Asia in the early years of the Cold War.

Professor Lui is Head of Timoth Dwight College. Before coming to Yale, she held appointments at the Chicago History Museum (as public historian), at Williams College (as the Charles Gaius Bolin Fellow and seminar instructor in history), and at the Museum of Chinese in the Americas (as a curator).