
Assistant Professor of History
Spring 2025 Class Hours
Tue / Thu – 9:55 am to 11:10 am
Wed – 7:00 pm to 9:40 pm
Spring 2025 Office Hours
Tue – 2:30 pm to 4:30 pm
And By Appointment
Education
M.A. Columbia University (2018)
M.Phil. Columbia University (2019)
Ph.D. Columbia University (2023)
Courses
Biography
Hongdeng Gao is a historian of Asian America and the modern United States. Her research and teaching interests include race and ethnicity, migration, public health, and social movements in the urban space. At Williams she teaches survey courses on Asian American history and U.S. immigration history, as well as thematic seminars on science and medicine and Chinatowns in the U.S.
Her current book project, Remaking American Medicine, examines how Cold War geopolitics and cross-ethnic grassroots activism improved access to healthcare for under-served Chinese New Yorkers. Drawing from multi-sited archival research and rare oral history interviews with health professionals and neighborhood activists, this project integrates Asian American history into better known histories of community control and radical health movements in Black and Latinx communities. It also illuminates grassroots efforts that reduced barriers to care in Asian American and other marginalized communities.
Prior to coming to Williams, Gao was a postdoctoral fellow at the Inequality in America Initiative at Harvard University. She completed her Ph.D. in history at Columbia University and a B.A. at Pomona College. Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine the Library of Congress, the Hoover Institution Library & Archives, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, University of Minnesota Libraries, among others.
Selected Publications
Review of Timo Schrader, Loisaida as Urban Laboratory: Puerto Rican Community Activism in New York, Gotham Center for New York History Blog, April 31, 2021.
“Community Struggles for a New Gouverneur: Tackling the Deeper Roots of the City’s Unequal Hospital Care,” Gotham Center for New York History Blog, January 5, 2021.
“The Mandarin: Acts of Cultural Mapping that Promoted and Marginalized Chinese Food in San Francisco, 1850-1991,” Unfound, no. 2 (Fall 2015, 6-31).