Noted historian/commentator to analyze xenophobia across U.S. history

One of the nation’s leading immigration and Asian-American historians, Dr. Erika Lee, a University of Minnesota professor of history, will present the lecture “Xenophobia and Violence in American History” on Thursday, March 10, at 4 p.m., via Zoom.

Dr. Lee will engage the campus and surrounding community in a moderated question-and-answer session in which she discusses the United States’ complicated history as a nation of immigrants but also a place where, frequently, xenophobia spills over into violence. She will address the ways that fear, hatred and hostility toward immigrants have been a defining feature of the nation from the colonial era to today.

Benjamin Franklin ridiculing Germans for their “strange and foreign ways” is cited by Lee as an early example of xenophobia. Other illustrations include Americans’ anxiety over Irish Catholics turning xenophobia into a national political movement and the exclusion of Chinese immigrants, incarceration of Japanese-Americans and deportation of Mexicans.

“Today, Americans fear Muslims, Latinos, the so-called browning of America, and are calling COVID-19 the ‘Chinese Virus,’” Lee said. The talk will encourage the audience to confront this history while also helping it to understand how xenophobia works, why it has endured and how it threatens the future, she added.

"If we wish to confront xenophobia in our society, we have to understand that it has deeply knotted and intersecting roots in our past,” added Department of History Associate Professor Jennifer Hildebrand, who coordinates the Ethnic Studies program. “Dr. Lee's talk will help us to see the challenge that lies ahead of us while also clearly communicating why it is so crucial that we make the effort."

"If we wish to confront xenophobia in our society, we have to understand that it has deeply knotted and intersecting roots in our past.” – Dr. Jennifer Hildebrand

At the University of Minnesota, Lee is a Regents Professor, a Distinguished McKnight University Professor and the Rudolph J. Vecoli Chair in Immigration History. Lee is the director of the Immigration History Research Center, which she launched, and also oversees the new Immigrants in COVID America project and the collection and preservation of immigrant stories in a multilingual digital story-telling website.

A granddaughter of Chinese immigrants, Lee grew up in the San Francisco Bay area, attended Tufts University and received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of four award-winning books about U.S. immigration and Asian American history; her most recent, “America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States,” has been hailed as “unflinching and powerful” and “essential reading” by leading social justice scholars.

An active public intellectual, Lee has appeared in PBS’s “Asian Americans,” the History Channel’s “America: The Promised Land,” PBS’s “The Chinese Exclusion Act,” Bill Moyer’s “Chinese in America,” and interviews with “PBS NewsHour,” CNN, National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition,” “Code Switch,” “1A” and “Weekend Edition” and podcast “BackStory,” Public Radio International podcast “The World” and on the BBC, The New York Times, ABC News, NBC News, the Guardian media group, C-SPAN, The Washington Post, the Star (Minneapolis) Tribune, Beijing News and the Japan Times.

Her opinion pieces have been published in Time magazine, The Washington Post, the Daily (New York) News, USA Today and the Los Angeles Times.

To register for Lee’s talk, which is free and available to the public, go to the Events website. A non-downloadable link to a recording of the presentation, good for one week, will be shared with all attendees who register using a fredonia.edu email address.

Lee’s presentation, presented under the auspices of the Organization of American Historians as part of the OAH's Distinguished Lectureship Program, is sponsored by the Convocation Committee.