Jane Hong is the author of Opening the Gates to Asia: A Transpacific History of How America Repealed Asian Exclusion (University of North Carolina Press, 2019) and an associate professor of history at Occidental College. She serves on the managing board of the Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative (APARRI), the Board of Directors of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), and the Gilder-Lehrman Scholarly Advisory Board. 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 Fall 2024, Hong was one of 28 U.S. historians appointed to the Organization of American Historians’ Distinguished Lectureship Program.

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 completing a book exploring how post-1965 Asian im/migration has changed U.S. evangelical institutions and politics (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 work has been supported by the UCLA Institute of American Cultures, PRRI, the Louisville Institute, and APARRI.

Hong’s next book uses the histories of Orange County and Los Angeles 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 conservatives since the 1970s. For a preview of this work, see Hong’s op-ed on the rise of Asian American GOP women in the Washington Post and piece on nonwhite Trump supporters in Time Magazine. This work is supported by the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation and the Huntington Library, where Hong is currently a Shapiro Center for American History and Culture (short-term) Fellow.

During the 2021-2022 academic year, Hong held a Visiting Scholar Fellowship at the UCLA Asian American Studies Center (you can find a short presentation of her research here) and was the recipient of a sabbatical grant from the Louisville Institute. She was a 2021-2023 Public Fellow in PRRI’s Religion and Renewing Democracy Initiative.

A public-facing historian and former classroom teacher deeply invested in K-12 history education, Hong is a frequent collaborator with the Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History. In June 2018, Hong led a K-12 teachers’ institute on U.S. immigration through a California lens, co-hosted by the Gilder-Lehrman Institute and the Spencer Foundation. In July 2024, Hong led a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) institute for 6th-12th grade teachers on Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) histories, also in partnership with the Gilder-Lehrman Institute. The institute gathered 36 educators from the continental US, Asia, Alaska, and American Samoa for a two-week intensive on how to teach AANHPI histories in middle and high school classrooms. See the institute’s social media archive for more on the roster of guest scholars and community leaders, topics covered, and local sites visited.

Born in Brooklyn and raised in northern New Jersey, Hong earned a Ph.D. in history from Harvard and a B.A. from Yale. She currently lives in Los Angeles.