The Institute for Common Power Course

“The Surprising History of Asian Americans and Racial Justice”

Dr. Ellen Wu

Thursdays, May 8, 15, 22, 2025

Lecture #1 (“Diversity”) explores how the “minority rights” revolution of the 20th century, sparked by the Black Freedom Movement, widened to encompass Asian Americans.

Lecture #2 (“Data”) deep-dives into the strange status of Asian Americans as an “overrepresented” (rather than “underrepresented”) minority group.

Lecture #3 (“Democracy”) overviews the little-known but increasingly consequential impact of Asian American political engagement.

Professor Ellen Wu researches, teaches, and writes about race, immigration, and United States history. She is a proud graduate of Indiana University Bloomington’s College of Arts and Sciences, where she doubled majored in Biology and History. Prof. Wu earned an MA in Asian American Studies at UCLA and a PhD in History at the University of Chicago. She is now Associate Professor of History and Associate Director of the College Arts and Humanities Institute at IU Bloomington.

Prof. Wu’s scholarship has been supported with fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and New America. She is author of the award-winning book The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority (2014). Her research has been featured in a variety of public-facing platforms, including Washington Post, Slate, NPR, Goop, Adam Ruins Everything, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, and the PBS documentary series Asian Americans.

Currently Prof. Wu is writing 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).