Hate crimes are nothing new to members of the Asian American community.  Dr. Janelle Wong helps us put them in historical context—from the Asian Exclusion Acts to the rise in violence targeting Asian Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Wong is a professor of American Studies and a core faculty member in the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Maryland.  From 2001-2012, Wong was a member of the Departments of Political Science and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.  She received her Ph.D. in 2001 from the Department of Political Science at Yale University. Wong is the author of  “Immigrants, Evangelicals and Politics in an Era of Demographic Change” (2018), “Democracy’s Promise: Immigrants and American Civic Institutions” (2006), and co-author of two books on Asian American politics, including “Asian American Political Participation: Emerging Constituents and their Political Identities” (2011),  which is based on the first national, multilingual, multiethnic survey of Asian Americans.  Wong was a Co-Principal Investigator on the 2016 National Asian American Survey, a nationwide survey of Asian American political and social attitudes and served on the national board of the Association for Asian American Studies from 2014 to 2017.