Profile

A scholar of race, immigration, US-China relations, and urban history, Charlotte Brooks has published widely on Asian American history, especially Chinese American history. Her most recent book is American Exodus: Second Generation Chinese Americans in China, 1901-1949 (University of California Press, 2019), which explores the lives of the thousands of Chinese American citizens who settled in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and the Pearl River Delta before World War II. She is also the author of Between Mao and McCarthy: Chinese American Politics in the Cold War Years (University of Chicago Press, 2015), a comparative study of Chinese American political activism in New York and San Francisco between World War Two and the late 1960s, and Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California (University of Chicago Press, 2009), which uses Asian Americans’ experiences with housing discrimination to explore the startlingly rapid racial transformation of mid-century urban California. In addition, Prof. Brooks’ articles have appeared in numerous journals, including the Journal of American History, the Journal of American Ethnic History, and the Journal of Urban History, and her work has also been reprinted in The Best American History Essays.