Victor Jew, a native of Los Angeles, teaches for the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he offers courses such as “Asian Hollywood: Fads and Fears,” “Asian American Food Worlds,” and the “Introduction to Asian American Studies.” He graduated from UCLA and earned his Ph.D. in U.S. History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Victor Jew has published on Midwestern Asian American topics: he co-edited a volume of first-person accounts about being Asian American in the Midwest by Midwestern Asian Americans (Asian Americans in Michigan published by Wayne State University Press.)

Victor Jew has also published on Los Angeles Chinese American history, specifically two essays about the anti-Chinese massacre that happened in Los Angeles on October 24, 1871. These essays are “The Anti-Chinese Massacre of 1871 and Its Strange Career” published in A Companion to Los Angeles edited by William Deverell and a new interpretation of the 1871 massacre that appeared as “The Anti-Chinese Massacre in Los Angeles as a Reconstruction-era event” in the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Urban History edited by Timothy Gilfoyle.

His talk will explore the untaught and largely unknown history of Chinese America in the U.S. Midwest. Drawing upon a range of sources, this presentation will discuss the many dimensions that made Chinese America and Asian America in the Midwest from 1870 to the present. The large themes of Chinese American history played out in the Midwest (for example, Chinese Exclusion enforcement was active in Chicago, Detroit, and St. Louis) and one might assume that the Midwestern history simply replicated what happened on the West Coast, but Midwestern Chinese American history had its own shape and emphases. “Long Time Midwestrn’” will discern the contours of that history and suggest ways to study further the past of Chinese America in the land that Abraham Lincoln called, “The Great Interior Region.”