Madeline Y. Hsu

Madeline Y. Hsu (; born 3 October 1967) is a historian known for her scholarship in Asian American, US immigration, and migration history. She is the director of the Center for Global Migration Studies at the University of Maryland and is an elected Fellow of the Society of American Historians. She is the eldest granddaughter of the neo-Confucian scholar Xu Fuguan.

Early life and education Born in Columbia, Missouri, Hsu spent her childhood between her maternal grandparents' home in Arkansas and where her father found employment in Taiwan and Hong Kong. She completed a BA (1989) in history at Pomona College, followed by a MA (1993) and PhD (1996) in history from Yale University. During her graduate studies, she studied modern Chinese history with Jonathan Spence and Betsy Bartlett, and US immigration history from David Montgomery.

Career Hsu taught at San Francisco State University from 1996 to 2006, before taking a post at the University of Texas at Austin in 2006, where she served as Director of the Center for Asian American Studies (2006–2014) and was Mary Helen Thompson Centennial Professor in the Humanities and Professor of History and Asian American Studies.

In 2021, Hsu was elected a Fellow of the Society of American Historians.

Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home, based on her PhD dissertation, studies the lives of Chinese men working in the US during the era of Chinese Exclusion, and their transnational connections with their home villages.

The Good Immigrants received several other honors including the 2016 Robert H. Ferrell Book Prize; the 2015 Theodore J. Saloutos Book Award; the 2015 Chinese American Librarians Association Award for non-fiction; and named as a 2014–2015 Asian Pacific American Librarians Association Adult Non-Fiction Honor Book.

Hsu is the lead scholar for “Teach Immigration History," a curriculum project cosponsored by IEHS, the NEH, and UT Austin for high school teachers of U.S. history and civics, as well as for general audiences. The website provides an 80-item chronology of key events, laws, and court rulings that are further explained by a dozen thematic lesson plans on topics such as citizenship, an overview of major laws, gender and immigration, and migration within the Americas.

Selected publications

Edited Works

Co-edited with Sucheng Chan. Chinese Americans and the Politics of Race and Culture. Temple University Press, 2008. Editor. Chinese American Transnational Politics by Him Mark Lai. University of Illinois Press, 2010. Honorable Mention, 2012 Association for Asian American Studies History Book Award. Co-edited with Maddalena Marinari and Maria Cristina Garcia. A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered: U.S. Society in an Age of Restriction, 1924-1965. University of Illinois Press, 2019. Co-edited with Marcelo Borges and Donna Gabaccia. Cambridge History of Global Migrations, Vol. II. Cambridge University Press, 2023. With Borges, Hsu co-edits the Studies of World Migration book series published by the University of Illinois Press.