Historian Beth Lew-Williams has been named a recipient of the 2025 Dan David Prize, recognizing “outstanding scholarship that illuminates the past and seeks to anchor public discourse in a deeper understanding of history.”

She is one of nine early and mid-career researchers globally to win a $300,000 award “in recognition of their achievements and to support their future endeavors,” according to the prize announcement.

Lew-Williams, a professor of history and the director of the Program in Asian American Studies at Princeton, has taught at Princeton since 2014. She is an expert on Asian American history and a historian of migration and race.

The award citation recognized her “rigorous yet imaginative scholarship that uncovers the unique stories of racial exclusion and oppression against Asian Americans, as well as the lived experiences of Chinese migrants.”

“I’m grateful that the foundation is investing in the study of the human past, because I think we’re desperately in need of historical perspectives right now,” said Lew-Williams. “I see this as an opportunity to bring attention to the long history of nativist policies and the impact on immigrants’ lives.”

The prize is endowed by the Dan David Foundation, a charitable organization based in Liechtenstein, and headquartered at Tel Aviv University. Winners are selected by a global committee of historians following an open nomination process.

Lew-Williams is the author of “The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion and the Making of the Alien in America” (Harvard University Press, 2018) and the forthcoming “John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life under American Racial Law” (Harvard University Press, 2025), supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities grant.

She was recognized by the University for her undergraduate teaching excellence with the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award in 2024. Among other honors and awards, she has been a fellow of the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

“The Chinese Must Go” won the 2019 Ray Allen Billington Prize and the Ellis W. Hawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians.

Lew-Williams earned an A.B. from Brown University and her Ph.D. from Stanford.