Mae Ngai, Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History at Columbia University, is the History Department's Taft Departmental Lecturer for the 2013-14 academic year. Her visit is being co-sponsored by the Urban Morgan Institute for Human Rights in the College of Law. Her talks will take place on Wednesday and Thursday afternoons 17-18 October 2013. Time and place to be announced. 

Professor Ngai is the author of award winning Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (2004) and The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America (2010). Her current work about which she will speak when she visits, titled Yellow and Gold: The Chinese Mining Diaspora, 1848-1908, is a study of Chinese gold miners and racial politics in nineteenth century California, the British colony of Victoria in Australia, and the South African Transvaal. Before becoming a historian, she was a labor union organizer and educator in New York City, working for District 65-UAW and the Consortium for Worker Education.