Mary Ting Yi Lui is a professor of American studies and history at Yale University. Her primary research interests include Asian American history, urban history, women's 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 (2005), a cowinner of the best history book prize from the Association of Asian American Studies. The book uses a unsolved 1909 murder case to examine race, gender, and interracial sexual relations in the cultural, social, and spatial formation of New York City Chinatown from 1870 to 1920. She is currently working on a new book entitled "Making Model Minorities: Asian Americans, Race, and Citizenship in Cold War America at Home and Abroad," which examines the history of Asian Americans and U.S. cultural diplomacy in Asia in the early years of the Cold War.
This lecture focuses on the late 19th and early 20th century migrations — domestic and international — that shaped the growth of New York City. In particular, the lecture addresses these histories of migration and settlement that gave rise to racial and ethnic tensions and patters of exclusion and segregation.