Adroitly employing discourses of race and health, these activists argued that Chinese Americans were worthy and deserving of sharing in the resources of American society. Shah shows how Chinese Americans responded to health regulations and allegations with persuasive political speeches, lawsuits, boycotts, violent protests, and poems. The book examines how the demonization of Chinese immigrants reverberated in policy, politics and cultural life of San Francisco residents and the United States. Shah's first book, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown, investigates the long history of the perception of Chinatown and Chinese immigrants as sources of contagion.

His research is most well known for its reconceptualization of how racial meanings are remade by articulations of gender and sexuality in state politics and culture. Shah is a historian with expertise in North American and global struggles over public health, migration and incarceration from the mid-nineteenth through twenty-first centuries. He received his doctoral degree in history at the University of Chicago and previously worked as a professor of history at University of California, San Diego and Binghamton University. Nayan Shah is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and History at University of Southern California. Assistant Professor, Binghamton University, 1995-2000.Associate Professor, University of California, San Diego, 2000-2012.Professor, University of California, San Diego, 2012.Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and History at University of Southern California.History, Economics and Religion, Swarthmore College, 1988

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