Chrissy Lau PhD

Chrissy Lau is an interdisciplinary scholar trained in the fields of History, Asian American Studies, and Feminist Studies. Her research and teaching interests include Asian American History, U.S. Women’s History, California History, and Public History.

Her first book manuscript, New Women of Empire: Gendered Politics and Racial Uplift in Interwar Japanese America (University of Washington Press, 2022), tells the stories of college-aged Japanese American youth that became leaders of their communities and rebuilt gender relations, community welfare and trans-Pacific ties during an era of immigration exclusion and racial segregation.

During COVID-19, she joined the Auntie Sewing Squad, a mutual aid collective that made and sent homemade masks to vulnerable BIPOC communities. She co-edited a collection, The Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to Mask Making, Radical Care, and Racial Justice (University of California Press, 2021), that archives and theorizes the labor and care of sewing and the political genealogies of the Aunties who participated in the Squad. She also built a digital archive, the Auntie Sewing Squad Oral History Archive, where students conducted oral histories with the Aunties about their histories of sewing and activism.

• PhD History, University of California, Santa Barbara
• MA History, University of California, Santa Barbara
• BA Asian American Studies and Law & Society, University of California, Santa Barbara

• 210 History of Asians in the U.S.
• 810 Asian American Immigration

Asian American History, U.S. Women’s History, California History, and Public History.

• “Coalitional Organizing: The Origins of the Asian American Protestant Movement of the 1960s/70s” in Daniel Lee ed., The Theologies of Asian Americans and Pacific Peoples: A Reader, Claremont Press, 2023.

• New Women of Empire: Gendered Politics and Racial Uplift in Interwar Japanese America, University of Washington Press, 2022.

• Co-editor of The Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to Mask Making, Radical Care, and Racial Justice, University of California Press, 2021.