Jane Hong

Jane Hong is the author of Opening the Gates to Asia: A Transpacific History of How America Repealed Asian Exclusion (University of North Carolina Press, 2019).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 Gilder-Lehrman Scholarly Advisory Board, the managing board of the Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative (APARRI), and the Board of Directors of the Public Religion Research Institute(PRRI). Hong appears in two episodes of the Peabody Award-winning PBS docuseries, Asian Americans (2020). An active public speaker, Hong has shared her expertise with the Brookings Institution, Uber, and NPR’s The Takeaway, in addition to academic and faith-based venues. Hong 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. In June 2018, Hong led a K-12 teachers’ institute on U.S. immigration through a California lens, hosted by the Gilder-Lehrman Institute and the Spencer Foundation. In July 2024, Hong will lead a two-week NEH seminar for 6-12 grade teachers on Asian American and Pacific Islander histories, in partnership with Gilder-Lehrman.

Hong’s first book, Opening the Gates to Asia (2019), charts a transnational movement to repeal America’s Asian exclusion laws at the intersection of Black civil rights and Asian decolonization. Drawing on archives in the US, India, and the Philippines, it argues that repeal was part of the price of America’s post-World War II empire in Asia. In addition to Japanese & Chinese Americans and their allies, the book centers the work of Indians and Filipinos in Asia and the US, tracing how their campaigns for repeal became entangled with anticolonial movements for Indian and Philippine independence.

Hong is currently finishing a book exploring how post-1965 Asian im/migrants have changed U.S. evangelical institutions and politics for Oxford University Press. Based on archives and over 100 oral history interviews, the project connects two historical developments that have transformed racial and religious politics in America over the past half century: the rise of the Religious Right and demographic changes resulting from the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. This research has been supported by the UCLA Institute for American Cultures, the Louisville Institute, APARRI, and PRRI.

Hong's next book uses the history of Orange County, California, to chart the rise of conservatism and political polarization among im/migrant communities of color, with a focus on Asian American and Latina/o/x conservatives since the 1970s. This work is supported by the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation. For a preview of this research, see Hong’s Washington Post piece.