Henry Yu

Henry Yu, Principal, St. John’s College and Associate Professor of History at British Columbia University (UBC).   He was born in Vancouver, B.C., and grew up in Vancouver and on Vancouver Island. He received his bachelor of arts degree in Honors History from UBC and a masters and doctorate degrees in History from Princeton University.  After teaching at UCLA for a decade, Yu returned to UBC as an Associate Professor of History to help build programs focused on trans-Pacific Canada. Yu himself is both a second and fourth generation Canadian. His parents were first generation immigrants from China, joining a grandfather who had spent almost his entire life in Canada. His great-grandfather was also an early Chinese pioneer in British Columbia, part of a larger networks of migrants who left Zhongshan county in Guangdong province in South China and settled around the Pacific in places such as Australia, New Zealand, Hawai’i, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, the United States, and Canada. Prof. Yu’s book, Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America (Oxford University Press, 2001) won the Norris and Carol Hundley Prize as the Most Distinguished Book of 2001.