Julia Xiang-Wang

Julia Xiang-Wang is a first-year PhD student in the History Department. 

Julia Xiang-Wang's research lies at the intersections of 20th Century U.S. diplomatic history and immigration history where she primarily focuses on the bilateral relations of refugee acceptance and asylum procedure in the post-WWII period. Her current interests include the diplomatic philosophy behind the U.S. role in the formation of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and how U.S. Cold War strategic interests in the Near East/West Asia affected global migration flows and the transformation of domestic immigration policy. Other projects include how developing concerns with terrorism and the national security state in the 1970s and 1980s manifested in immigration, refugee, and asylee acceptance and deportation procedures and its accompanying domestic and transnational policy ramifications. Despite primarily working as an Americanist, her research regularly extends beyond traditional geographies and interrogates normative distinctions between the national and international as traced through the state’s policing of citizen and noncitizen bodies. 

Julia graduated with honors with her B.A. in History from Bowdoin College (2026) where she received the Class of 1875 Prize in American History for her thesis on the role of nativism in the development of U.S. interwar refugee policy and its intersections with the country’s developing foreign policy interests in the Middle East. She is a Mellon Mays graduate fellow at the Mellon Foundation, a member of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), United Campus Workers (UCW) union, and an avid crochet and printmaking enthusiast.