[1] Her work focuses on nationalism, citizenship, ethnicity, immigration, and race in 20th-century United States history.

[3] Ngai holds a BA from Empire State College, a MA (1993) and PhD (1998) from Columbia University, where she wrote her dissertation under Eric Foner.

[4] After graduation, Ngai obtained postdoctoral fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the New York University School of Law, and, in 2003, the Radcliffe Institute.

[5] Ngai is especially interested in problems of nationalism, citizenship, and race as they are produced historically in law and society, in processes of transnational migration, and in the formation of ethno-racial communities.

[5] Ngai's most notable work was Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America, which discusses the creation of the legal category of an "illegal alien" in the early 20th century and its social and historical consequences and context.