Mary Lui

Mary Lui is Professor of American Studies and History. 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 (Princeton University Press, 2005), the 2007 co-winner of the best book prize for history from the Association of Asian American Studies. The book uses a 1909 unsolved murder case to examine race, gender, and interracial sexual relations in the cultural, social and spatial formation of New York City Chinatown from 1870-1920. Her current research focuses on the transnational cultural history of Asian Americans during the early years of the Cold War, 1945-1965.  Her book project, Making Model Minorities: Asian Americans, Race, and Citizenship in Cold War America at Home and Abroad, examines the history of Asian American and U.S. cultural diplomacy in Asia during this time.  

She is also a principal collaborator on the Asian Americans and STEM initiative at Yale along with Professor Theodore Kim in computer science and Professor Reina Maruyama in physics and astronomy.  With Ted Kim, she recently published “Global Routes and Hidden Labor in the American Mathematical Society’s Cold War Chinese Mathematics Translation Program” in the journal, Historical Studies of the Natural Sciences, vol. 54, no. 3 (June 2024).