Ellen D. Wu, National Fellow, researches, teaches, and writes about race and immigration in United States history. She is an associate professor of history at Indiana University Bloomington and the author of the award-winning book The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority (2014).
Wu’s scholarship has been supported with fellowships from the Ford Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Texas at Austin’s Institute for Historical Studies, and the University of Chicago’s Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture. Her work has been featured in a variety of academic and public-facing platforms, including Modern American History, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, NPR’s Code Switch, Goop, Adam Ruins Everything, and the PBS documentary series Asian Americans. As a fellow, she worked on her forthcoming book Overrepresented: The Surprising History of Asian Americans and Racial Justice, a new story about diversity, data, and democracy in the United States forthcoming from Princeton University Press.
Selected Work
- A California Proposition Could Reinstate Affirmative Action. Why Are Some Asian Americans Against It?: A conversation in Mother Jones about how history helps us to comprehend the strange position of Asian Americans in the ongoing affirmative action debate.
- The Complex History—and Ongoing Realities—of the “Model Minority” Stereotype: An interview with Goop about Asian Americans' relationship to white supremacy and anti-Black racism, and the harms that have resulted from being typecast as the "good" people of color.
- How America Created the Model Minority Myth: A segment from the TruTV comedy series Adam Ruins Everything based on research on the invention of the "model minority" stereotype.