I am a historian of U.S. immigration and empire, with a focus on Asia after World War II. I was trained as a historian of the US in the World in the International History track at Harvard University, where I also completed a secondary field in modern Korean history.

My forthcoming book uses the history of Asian American evangelicals as a lens to explore intersections of race, religion, and politics since the 1970s. An Ambivalent Presence: Asian American Evangelicals and the Problem of Race (Oxford University Press, 2027) charts how post-1965 Asian immigration changed the optics and economics of U.S. evangelical institutions and politics without fundamentally changing their power structures. Asian Americans are currently the fastest growing racial group in the country, with more immigrants coming to the United States from Asia than from anywhere else in the world. They are also one of the fastest growing populations within U.S. evangelicalism. Today Asian Americans lead the National Association of Evangelicals, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, and Evangelicals (now, Christians) for Social Action, among other flagship organizations. Yet little is known about them and their history in the United States. Drawing from archival research and over 100 oral history interviews, I chart how Asians and Asian Americans have changed Christian higher education, parachurch groups, church denominations, national evangelical organizations, and faith-based political lobbies. In so doing, my work connects two developments that have reshaped racial and religious politics in America over the past fifty years: the rise of the Religious Right and the demographic transformations resulting from the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act.
My next book, Beyond Demographic Destiny: How Immigrants of Color Are Changing American Conservatism and Race, uses Orange County, California, as a lens to chart the rise of conservatism and political polarization among immigrant and refugee communities of color, with a focus on Asian American and Latina/o conservatives since the 1970s. 

My next book, Beyond Demographic Destiny: How Immigrants of Color Are Changing American Conservatism and Race, uses Orange County, California, as a lens to chart the rise of conservatism and political polarization among immigrant and refugee communities of color, with a focus on Asian American and Latina/o conservatives since the 1970s.

My research has been supported by a year-long fellowship at the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, a sabbatical grant from the Louisville Institute, and grants from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), the Huntington Library, the John Randolph and Dora Haynes Foundation, and the Asian Pacific American Religion Research Initiative (APARRI). For a preview of some themes explored in chapter 1 of my forthcoming book, watch my April 2021 talk at Princeton Theological Seminary’s “Lived Theology in Asian America: Race, Justice, and Politics in Transpacific Context” conference. The talk is titled “The Asian American Movement and the Church.”