Beth Lew-Williams is Professor of History and Director of the Program in Asian American Studies at Princeton University. 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 Chinese Must Go won the Ray Allen Billington Prize and the Ellis W. Halley Prize from the Organization of American Historians.

Her second book, John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life under American Racial Law (Harvard University Press, September 2025) was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Drawing on dozens of archives across the US West, the book reveals the depth of anti-Chinese discrimination beyond federal exclusion and tells the stories of those who refused to accept a conditional place in American life.

Lew-Williams earned her A.B. from Brown University and Ph.D. in History from Stanford University. She has held fellowships from the 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.

Teaching Interests

Her teaching interests include Asian American studies, ethnic studies, migration & borders, gender & sexuality, violence, and the history of the U.S. West.

Selected Articles

“‘Chinamen’ and ‘Delinquent Girls’: Intimacy, Exclusion and a Search for California’s Color Line,” Journal of American History (December 2017): 632-655.

“Before Restriction Became Exclusion: America’s Experiment in Diplomatic Immigration Control,” Pacific Historical Review 83, no. 1 (February 2014): 24-56.