FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Madeline Y. Hsu and Henry Yu Join Lingnan Foundation Board of Trustees
Costa Mesa, California – December 11, 2018
Madeline Y. Hsu and Henry Yu will be joining the Lingnan Foundation Board of Trustees after both of their appointments were unanimously approved at the Lingnan Board meeting on November 12, 2018 in Costa Mesa, California.
The Lingnan Foundation, an American philanthropy founded in 1893 in New York, seeks to contribute to the advancement of higher education in South China and thereby promote understanding between the peoples of the two countries by supporting scholarly exchange, educational innovation, and service to society.
Dr. Chui L. Tsang, Chair of the Lingnan Foundation, remarked on Drs. Hsu and Yu’s appointments, “The Lingnan Foundation is fortunate to have such accomplished and respected academicians joining the Board of Trustees. Their research interests and extensive experiences in higher education will be especially valuable in the Asian and historical contexts of our work in the future.”
With Dr. Yu and Dr. Hsu having ancestral roots from China, Dr. Ding-Jo Currie, President of Lingnan Foundation commented, “I am looking forward to working with our new Trustees who bring such richness with their personal cultural perspectives and respected leadership to our Board, programs, and especially as role models for our Lingnan W.T. Chan Fellows.”
Dr. Madeline Y. Hsu is Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin and core faculty in the Center for Asian American Studies. She was born in Columbia, Missouri but grew up in Taiwan and Hong Kong between visits with her grandparents at their store in Altheimer, Arkansas.
She received her undergraduate degrees in History from Pomona College and PhD from Yale University. Her first book was Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration between the United States and South China, 1882-1943 (Stanford University Press, 2000). Her most recent monograph, The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority (Princeton University Press, 2015), received awards from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association, and the Association for Asian American Studies. Her third book, Asian American History: A Very Short Introduction was published by Oxford University Press in 2016 and the co-edited anthology, A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered: U.S. Society in an Age of Restriction, 1924-1965 is forthcoming in 2019 from the University of Illinois Press. She is president of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society and vice-president of the International Society for the Study of Chinese Overseas.
Dr. Henry Yu, Director of the Initiative for Student Teaching and Research on Chinese Canadians (INSTRCC) and the Principal of St. John’s College at 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. Dr. Yu's most recent publication is Journeys of Hope: Challenging Discrimination and Building On Vancouver Chinatown's Legacies. He received the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2012 and the Province of BC’s Multicultural Award in 2015 in recognition of his community leadership.
The Lingnan Foundation believes the relationship between China and the United States is of profound importance to the world’s future and that higher education is a crucial venue for realizing these objectives. The Foundation supports institutions or organizations in the United States or elsewhere that reflect the Lingnan spirit of “Education for Service”.
To learn more about the Lingnan Foundation, please contact Dr. Ding-Jo Currie at 714-371-4118, or email at Info@LingnanFoundation.org.
Madeline Hsu+ Henry Yu_LingnanFdnPressRelease 2018-12-11
