Madeline Y. Hsu

In 2021, Hsu was elected a Fellow of the Society of American Historians. She has also served as President (2018–2021) of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society.

The Good Immigrants received several other honors including the 2016 Robert H. Ferrell Book Prize; the 2015 Theodore J. Saloutos Book Award; the 2015 Chinese American Librarians Association Award for non-fiction; and named as an 2014-2015 Asian Pacific American Librarians Association Adult Non-Fiction Honor Book.

Hsu's work in Chinese American and Asian American history has been well received, with her first two books, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home (2000) and The Good Immigrants (2015), given the History Book Award by the Association for Asian American Studies in 2002 and 2017, respectively.

Hsu taught at San Francisco State University from 1996 to 2006, before taking a post at the University of Texas at Austin in 2006, where she served as Director of the Center for Asian American Studies (2006–2014) and is currently Mary Helen Thompson Centennial Professor in the Humanities and Professor of History and Asian American Studies.

Born in Columbia, Missouri, Hsu spent her childhood between her maternal grandparents' home in Arkansas and where her father found employment in Taiwan and Hong Kong. She completed a BA (1989) in history at Pomona College, followed by a MA (1993) and PhD (1996) in history from Yale University. During her graduate studies, she studied modern Chinese history with Jonathan Spence and Betsy Bartlett, and US immigration history from David Montgomery.

Madeline Y. Hsu (Chinese: 徐元音; born 3 October 1967) is a historian known for her scholarship in Chinese American and Asian American history. She is an elected Fellow of the Society of American Historians. She is the eldest granddaughter of the neo-Confucian scholar Xu Fuguan.

Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home, based on her PhD dissertation, studies the lives of Chinese men working in the US during the era of Chinese Exclusion, and their transnational connections with their home villages. While Chinese laborers were racially targeted as unwelcome immigrants up until the 1940s and 1950s, her second book, The Good Immigrants, focuses on the recruitment of Chinese students who were seen as benefiting both China and the extension of U.S. influence abroad.  During World War II, their high levels of education and attainments made them attractive as “good” immigrants. This shift to “brain drain” policies became permanent with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 which consolidated the transformation of many Asians, and especially Chinese, from “yellow peril” to "model minorities".