Ellen D. Wu

• Assistant Professor, Department of History
• Assistant Professor, Asian American Studies Program

Education

• B.A., B.S., Indiana University, 1996
  
• M.A., University of California, Los Angeles, 1998
  
• Ph.D., University of Chicago, 2006

Contact Information

Ballantine Hall, Rm. 826

(812) 855-6344

Background

The questions that I am currently exploring in my work deal with issues of race, immigration, citizenship, and nation through the lens of Asian American history.  My book manuscript-in-progress, tentatively titled Race and Asian American Citizenship from World War Two to the Movement, takes as its central problematic the changing race and citizenship status of Chinese and Japanese Americans after the end of Asiatic exclusion in the 1940s and 1950s.  I examine Asian American racial formation in the context of both the Cold War and Civil Rights movement as a way to suggest that racialization, citizenship, and nation-building in the mid-20th century United States were inextricably intertwined processes informed by both domestic and international concerns.

My teaching areas will complement my research interests. As a faculty member of the emerging Asian American Studies program on campus, I will be offering a range of courses that examine the political, social, and cultural history of Asian Americans and how these experiences can offer insight into broader issues of race, citizenship, migration, and nationalism/transnationalism.

Before coming to IU in the fall of 2007, I taught at Rutgers University-New Brunswick and in the University of California, Los Angeles's Asian American Studies program.  

Research Interests

• Asian American History
• Postwar American society, culture, and politics
• Race and ethnicity
• Citizenship and nation
• Immigration and migration
• Transnationalism

Courses Recently Taught

• Asian American History
• Hawai’i and the United States
• America in the 1950s
• Immigration, Race, and Nation in Modern America

Publication Highlights

“‘America’s Chinese’: Anti-Communism, Citizenship, and Cultural Diplomacy During the Cold War,” Pacific Historical Review (August 2008).

 “Chinese American Transnationalism Aboard the ‘Love Boat’: The Overseas Chinese Youth Language Training and Study Tour to the Republic of China,” Chinese America: History and Perspectives, 2005.

With Nakanishi, Don T. Distinguished Asian American Political and Government Leaders. Phoenix, AZ: Greenwood Press, 2002.