Professor of History and American Studies, Yale University
Notable work
The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York City
Mary Ting Yi Lui (born 1967) is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University and head of Yale's Timothy Dwight College.[1][2] She is Yale's first tenured professor specializing in Asian American Studies and the first Asian American female to serve as head of a Yale residential college.[3][4][5] A former director of undergraduate studies and director of graduate studies for Yale University's American Studies program, she is also affiliated with Yale's Ethnicity, Race, and Migration program and its Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program.[6] Lui is the author of The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York City, a co-winner of the 2007 Best Book Prize for History from the Association for Asian American Studies.[7]
Mary Lui's first book The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York City examines the unsolved 1909 murder of Elsie Sigel to explore race, gender, and interracial sexual relations in the formation of New York City Chinatown, 1870–1920. Using a variety of English and Chinese-language sources such as census data, church records, reportage, and immigration files, Lui argues that coverage of the case magnified public hostility toward inter-racial relationships and further restricted Chinese mobility in New York City's Chinatown.[11][12][13][14][15][16]
Lui is currently at work 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 during the Cold War.[17]
^Lui, Mary (2005). The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York City, Princeton University Press, Princeton.
^Iu, Petula (Fall 2006). "The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York City (review)". Journal of Social History. 40 (1): 270–27. doi:10.1353/jsh.2006.0085. S2CID142836127.
^Moon, Krystyn (April 2006). "MARY TING YI LUI. The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York City. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2005. Pp. xii, 298. $29.95". The American Historical Review. 111 (2): 495–496. doi:10.1086/ahr.111.2.495.
^Yu, Renqiu (March 2006). "The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York City". The Journal of American History. 92 (4): 1462–1463. doi:10.2307/4485967. JSTOR4485967.