LAWRENCE — Historian Erika Lee will talk about her 2019 book, “America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States,” at an event this week for the Hall Center for the Humanities.
“Erika Lee: America for Americans” will take place at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 22, and be livestreamed via the Hall Center Crowdcast page.
Lee teaches American history at the University of Minnesota, where she is a Regents Professor, a Distinguished McKnight University Professor, the Rudolph J. Vecoli Chair in Immigration History and the director of the Immigration History Research Center.
The granddaughter of Chinese immigrants, Lee grew up in the San Francisco Bay area, attended Tufts University and received her doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley. Lee is the author of four award-winning books in U.S. immigration and Asian American history, including “At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943,” “The Making of Asian-America” and “Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America,” co-authored with Judy Yung.
As director of the Immigration History Research Center, Lee has worked to merge immigration history with the digital humanities. She launched and oversees the National Endowment for the Humanities-funded Immigrant Stories Project, which works with recent immigrants and refugees to collect, preserve and share their experiences through a new multilingual digital story-telling website and collection. She also founded and co-organized the #ImmigrationSyllabus, a digital educational resource offering historical perspectives on contemporary immigration debates.
This series of events is co-sponsored by the KU Center for Migration Research. To learn more about the series, please visit the Hall Center’s series webpage at: hallcenter.ku.edu/migration-stories.
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