Beth Lew-Williams and book cover

Beth Lew-Williams receives Cundill History Prize for 'innovative and consequential' book

By
Rebekah Schroeder, Office of Communications
on Oct. 29, 2026, 12:46 p.m.
Photo by Sameer A. Khan/Fotobuddy; book jacket courtesy of the publisher

Beth Lew-Williams, a professor of history and the director of the Program in Asian American Studies at Princeton, has been awarded the prestigious international Cundill History Prize for her book, “John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life Under American Racial Law” (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2025).

The prize is awarded annually by McGill University to an individual whose book “embodies historical scholarship, originality, literary quality, and broad appeal.” Winners are selected by an international jury of historians and writers. 

Princeton alumnus Jonathan Cheng ’05, now the China bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal, was a Cundill Prize finalist for his book “Korean Messiah: Kim II Sung and the Christian Roots of North Korea’s Personality Cult” (Knopf, 2026).

Alexander Lee, of the University of Warwick in the U.K., was the other finalist, for “The First Ghetto: Venice and the Jews” (Picador, 2026).

Lew-Williams’ book traces the history of legal discrimination against Chinese immigrants in the United States and was supported by a 2020 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

“In her innovative and consequential book, Lew-Williams used extensive quantitative research and big data methods to uncover decades of history of anti-Chinese legislation in the United States,” the Cundill jury said in its announcement, praising the book for presenting “a new and unexpected history of American racial law.” The jury for the prize includes authors and academics with a broad range of specialties within history.

“Writing the book felt weighty because I wanted to do justice to this history,” Lew-Williams said. “I did my very best to capture the lives of Chinese immigrants and the thousands of racial laws they faced. I’m surprised and pleased that my work resonated with historians in fields so different from my own.”

Lew-Williams, an expert on Asian American history and a historian of migration and race, has taught at Princeton since 2014. She is also the author of “The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America” (Harvard University Press, 2018), which won the 2019 Ray Allen Billington Prize and the Ellis W. Hawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians.

“John Doe Chinaman” has also won the Bancroft Prize, the David J. Langum Sr. Prize in American Legal History, the Merle Curti Social History Award from the Organization of American Historians and the Caughey Western History Prize from the Western History Association. It was a finalist for the PROSE Award in North American/U.S. History.

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