Jane Hong is a historian of U.S. immigration and engagement with the world, with a focus on Asia after World War II. She is currently an associate professor of modern U.S. history at Occidental College and the author of Opening the Gates to Asia: A Transpacific History of How America Repealed Asian Exclusion (University of North Carolina Press, 2019). She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of American History, the executive board of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, and the Gilder-Lehrman Scholarly Advisory Board. A public-facing historian, she appears in two episodes of the Peabody Award-winning PBS docuseries, Asian Americans (2020), and the PBS World documentary Far East Deep South (2021).
An active public speaker, Hong has presented at Uber, the Brookings Institution, CohnReznick, Analysis Group, and the Leadership Council on Legal Diversity, in addition to academic and faith-based venues. She is committed to bridging academic and public history. Her work in this area includes leading K-12 teacher seminars for the Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History, consulting for television programs including Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and American Idol, and penning op-eds for the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times.
Hong’s current book project (under contract with Oxford University Press) uses the history of Asian American evangelicals as a lens to explore intersections of race, religion, and politics since the 1970s. Drawing from archival research and over one hundred oral history interviews, Hong charts how Asians and Asian Americans have changed Christian higher education, parachurch organizations, church denominations, national evangelical organizations, and faith-based political lobbies. In so doing, her work connects two developments that have reshaped racial and religious politics in America over the past fifty years: the rise of the Religious Right and the demographic transformations resulting from the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. This research has been supported by the UCLA Asian American Studies Center and the Louisville Institute.
Hong was a 2022-2023 PRRI Public Fellow.
