Beth Lew-Williams is a Professor of History and the Director of the Program in Asian American Studies at Princeton University. She is a historian of race and migration in the United States, specializing in the study of Asian Americans. 

Her first book, “The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America” (Harvard University Press, 2018), maps the tangled relationships between local racial violence, federal immigration policy, and U.S. imperial ambitions in Asia. The book won the Ray Allen Billington Prize and the Ellis W. Halley Prize from the Organization of American Historians. 

Lew-Williams’ forthcoming second book, “John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life under American Racial Law” (Harvard University Press, 2025) draws on dozens of archives from across the American West to reveal the depth of anti-Chinese discrimination beyond federal exclusion and to tell the stories of those who refused to accept a conditional place in American life. 

Broadly, Lew-Williams’ work focuses on the construction of racial and national boundaries, the role of the state in drawing these lines of division and hierarchy, and the implications for the lives of marginalized people. Her research relies on legal archives, but her writing foregrounds overlooked stories of Chinese migrants. The result is a compelling social history that captures the meaning of state power in everyday experiences.

Lew-Williams earned an AB degree from Brown University and a PhD from Stanford University. She has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies. At Princeton, her teaching was recognized by the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award.