Chinese America: History and Perspectives is a peer-review journal published by the Chinese Historical Society of America (CHSA). CHSA was established in 1963 and was the first society of its kind. Chinese America: History and Perspectives welcomes research on any and all aspects of Chinese American studies, Chinese American history, and Chinese in America. In addition, the journal welcomes oral histories, local community histories, and other historically related narratives.
Contributors are encouraged to submit an abstract prior to submitting a full paper to see if their work is an appropriate fit for the journal. We accept submissions on an on-going basis. The journal is published once a year in November/December.
The word count range must be between 3000-8000 words, not including references and endnotes. Photographs are welcome as long as contributor can grant copyright permission, and provide a high resolution version of it.
We welcome submissions by scholars, community members, and anyone with an interest in the study of the Chinese in America.
All accepted authors will have to be or become members of CHSA before their works are published by the journal. Membership information is available at: https://chsa.org/support/membership/
Submissions should be sent to journal@chsa.org.
Manuscripts should be formatted according to the Chicago Manual of Style.
Chinese America: History and Perspectives is a scholarly indexed journal available through EBSCO, PQ, JSTOR, Libris, etc.
A few specific pointers:
- Avoid footnotes. All notes should be placed at the end of the article as endnotes.
- Do not use double spaces. Use only single spaces between sentences.
Contributors will be sent a copyedited proof for review before publication.
Books for review:
H & P welcomes submission of books for review. Publishers should send all books for review, to:
Jonathan H. X. Lee, PhD
San Francisco State University
Department of Asian American Studies
1600 Holloway Ave, EP 103
San Francisco, CA 94132
History & Perspectives Journal Committee Biographies
Jonathan H. X. Lee (Editor-in-Chief) is Professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University. Lee’s research interests are in contemporary Chinese religions in ”cultural China,” material and visual religion, postcolonial studies, Asian American religious studies, and Asian and Asian American folklore. Lee is co-editor of Greenwood/ABC-CLIO’s Encyclopedia of Asian American Folklore and Folklife and author of Kendall & Hunt’s Cambodian American Experiences: Histories, Communities, Cultures, and Identities.
Charlotte Brooks is Professor of History at Baruch College, City University of New York. She is the author of American Exodus: Second Generation Chinese Americans in China, 1901-1949; Between Mao and McCarthy: Chinese American Politics in the Cold War Years; Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California; and numerous articles. Her research interests are transnational and comparative and include urban history, Sino-American relations, modern China and the Chinese diaspora, Asian American history, politics and policy, race, and immigration.
Yuk Wah Chan is Associate Professor at City University of Hong Kong. She obtained her PhD at the Department of Anthropology at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her publications include The Chinese/Vietnamese Diaspora: Revisiting the Boat People (2011), Vietnamese-Chinese Relationships at the Borderlands: Trade, Tourism and Cultural Politics (2014), and The Age of Asian Migration: Continuity, Diversity, and Susceptibility (Volume I) (with David Haines and Jonathan Lee, 2014). She is an editorial board member of Amsterdam University Press’s Asian Borderlands Series. Her research interests cover borderlands, migration and diaspora studies, tourism, identity and gender, and food politics and development.
Lan Dong is Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Springfield. She is the author of Mulan’s Legend and Legacy in China and the United States and Reading Amy Tan, and has also written a number of journal articles, book chapters, and essays on Asian American literature, children’s literature, and popular culture. She is the editor of Transnationalism and the Asian American Heroine, Teaching Comics and Graphic Narratives, and the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Asian American Culture: From Anime to Tiger Moms.
Colleen Fong is Professor of Ethnic Studies at California State University, East Bay. Her teaching and research interests lie in the contemporary and historical dimensions of family, gender, and immigration; her newest course, “Asian American Sites and Sounds,” is based on visits to immigrant sites. Fong’s publications include “In Search of the Right Spouse: Interracial Marriage among Chinese and Japanese Americans,” Amerasia Journal 21 (1995–96; coauthored with Judy Yung) and a review of Wayne Hung Wong’s American Paper Son in Oral History Review (2008). Her current research project is tentatively titled “Establishing and Maintaining Chinese Immigrant Laborers’ Families in the Shadow of Exclusion.”
Anna Hennessey is a visiting scholar at the Institute of Buddhist Studies, Berkeley. She is the author of Imagery, Ritual, and Birth: Ontology Between the Sacred and the Secular (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), which takes an in-depth look at the philosophical, religious, and artistic dimensions of birth. She has also examined birth as a rite of passage as it occurs around the world, including within the contexts of Chinese and Chinese American traditions. Her graduate work and PhD dissertation focused on the History of Chinese Religions. She is also in the presidential line of the American Academy of Religion, Western Region (2018-2021).
Alejandro Lee is Professor of Spanish at Santa Monica College. He earned both his Master in Library and Information Science and his Ph.D. in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from the University of California, Los Angeles. His teaching and research interests focus on heritage language education, folklore, and the Chinese diaspora in Latin American literature. Lee’s publications include “‘Preferible es un hijo deforme que una docena de hijas sabias como Buda’: refranes y resistencia en Hija de la fortuna de Isabel Allende,” Proverbium (2009); “Chinese Immigration to South America,” Chinese Americans: The History and Culture of a People, ABC-Clio/Greenwood Press (2015); and “At the Margins of the Nation: Chinese Immigrants in Contemporary Spanish American Fiction,” Amerasia Journal (2012). He is a co-founder of the annual Symposium on Asians in the Americas.
Genevieve Leung is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Language at the University of San Francisco. Her research focuses on intergenerational Hoisan-wa (Toisanese) language and cultural maintenance in the Bay Area. A proud product of dual language education, she is also interested in Cantonese–English bilingual learners and linguistically responsive pedagogies.
Ying Li is an Assistant Professor of Chinese at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center, located in the beautiful city of Monterey, CA. She earned her B.A. in Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language and M.A. in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics (minor in Chinese Folk Culture) from the School of Chinese Language and Literature at Beijing Foreign Studies University. She further earned a Ph.D. in Culture, Literacy, and Language from The University of Texas at San Antonio. She has more than 15 years of teaching and research experience on Chinese language and culture in China and the United States. Her teaching and research interests focus on culture(s) in Chinese language education, identity development of Chinese teachers and learners, and Chinese folk religion. Her most recent published work examined culture(s) reflected in Chinese teaching material development and its influence on learners’ identity construction in the United States. She currently serves as Treasurer on the Board of Directors for the Chinese Language Teachers Association of California.
Laurene Wu McClain is a history professor at City College of San Francisco and a practicing attorney. She is the co-author, with Charles J. McClain, of “The Chinese Contribution to the Development of American Law” in Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America, l882–l943 and co-editor of California Legal History Manuscripts in the Huntington Library. She edited “Breaking Racial Barriers: Wo Kee Company—A Collaboration Between a Chinese Immigrant and White American in Nineteenth-Century America” and “A Chinese American Woman’s Plight during the Cultural Revolution” by Wen Zhengde for the 2005 edition of Chinese America: History and Perspectives, and authored “From Victims to Victors: A Chinese Contribution to American Law—Yick Wo versus Hopkins” for the 2003 edition. Her work has been published in both China and the United States.
Franklin Ng is at California State University, Fresno, where he is a professor of anthropology and coordinator of the Asian American Studies and Asian Studies programs. He is the editor of The Asian American Encyclopedia (1994), author of The Taiwanese Americans (1998), and the co-editor with Mary Yu Danico of Asian American Issues (2005). He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of American Ethnic History and the Amerasia Journal, and he was the former editor of the Journal of American–East Asian Relations. He has been a past president of the Japanese American Citizens League, Fresno chapter, and the Association for Asian American Studies.
Dawn Lee Tu is currently the Faculty Director of Professional & Organizational Development at De Anza College. Lee Tu is an interdisciplinary engaged scholar and a diversity affairs professional with over twelve years of combined experience, specializing in building innovative diversity and inclusion programs in higher education. She holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from the University of California, Davis, where her research focused on diversity initiatives and Asian American student engagement in college. In 2010 she was Ethnographic Researcher for the U.S. Census Bureau and authored a site report on her findings, including recommendations for improvements and changes for the 2020 Census entitled “More Than Just Overcoming Language and Literacy Barriers: Non-Response Follow-Up Census Enumeration of Chinese in San Francisco Chinatown” (internal document). Lee Tu also authored “The ‘Movement’ as Folklore: Asian American College Youth and Vernacular Expressions of Asian Pacific American Heritage” in Asian American Identities and Practices: Folkloric Expressions in Everyday Life (2014).
Emily S. Wu is an instructor in the Religion Department and Service-Learning Program at Dominican University of California. Her primary research interest is in the healing rituals, practices, and narratives in Chinese and Chinese American contexts, and she is the author of Traditional Chinese Medicine in the United States: Searching for Spiritual Meaning and Ultimate Health (Lexington, 2013). She is currently a co-chair of the Steering Committee of the Religions, Medicines, and Healing group in the American Academy of Religion. Wu’s teaching and community work also explore deeply the diasporic, transnational, and cross-cultural Asian experiences. She directs several community-based student participation projects in the Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese American communities and serves as a board member for the Asian American Alliance of Marin.
Frank H. Wu is Distinguished Professor of Law, and former Chancellor & Dean of University of California Hastings College of Law. Wu is the author of Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White, which was immediately reprinted in its hardcover edition, and co-author of Race, Rights and Reparation: Law and the Japanese American Internment, which received a major grant from the Civil Liberties Public Education Fund. Wu is writing a book on the Vincent Chin case, and his op-ed discussing the significance of the subject appeared in The New York Times on the thirtieth anniversary of the crime. Other op-eds of his have appeared in the Washington Post, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, National Law Journal, and Chronicle of Higher Education.
