Unnatural Citizens

My current book project, Unnatural Citizens, explores racial exceptions to American citizenship in the early 20th century. It re-considers the conventional narrative in Asian American studies, which follows the history of legislation and jurisprudence that excluded Asians from naturalized citizenship. Using social history to read against and complicate that narrative, I tell the stories of Asian Americans who, despite barriers to the contrary, successfully naturalized; of Asian Americans, both naturalized and native-born, who lost their citizenship through denaturalization, expatriation, and marriage; and efforts to fight, address, and redress the ways their racial – and gender and family – status denied them social and legal equality within the United States.