Elizabeth Lew-Williams

Elizabeth Lew-Williams is a historian and professor of Asian American history at Princeton University, the first ever appointed by the school. Her research focuses on Asian American studies, migration, ethnic studies, violence, and the history of the U.S. West.

Biography Lew-Williams received a Ph.D. in history from Stanford University in 2010. Her dissertation was titled The Chinese Must Go: Immigration, Deportation, and Violence in the American West, 1882-1892. She is the author of The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion and the Making of the Alien in America.

Recognition In 2026, Lew-Williams won the Bancroft Prize for John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life Under American Racial Law''.