Beth Lew-Williams

Princeton University professor Beth Lew-Williams has won the 2026 Cundill History Prize.

The $75,000 (U.S.) prize, administered by McGill University, is awarded annually to a book published in English that embodies historical scholarship, originality, literary quality, and broad appeal. Two finalists each receive $10,000.

Lew-Williams, one of three finalists for this year’s prize, won for her book John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life under American Racial Law, published by The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. The book provides a history of the laws that curtailed the everyday lives of Chinese people in the American West.

Lew-Williams, a professor of history at Princeton and the first director of the university’s program in Asian American Studies, was named the winner at a ceremony in Montreal on Oct. 23.

“In John Doe Chinaman, Lew-Williams unravels the paradoxes of anti-Chinese racial laws in the American West from the 1850s to the 1920s, analysing the intentions of these laws, their effects, and how Chinese migrants responded to them,” jury chair Emily Greenwood said in a press release. “Using a supple combination of data algorithms to process legal and bureaucratic records and trenchant storytelling, Lew-Williams documents the ghosting of these lives in the historical record, retrieving Chinese voices that show us some of what we are missing. This is a dazzlingly innovative and hard-hitting work.”

Three finalists, including Canadian journalist Jonathan Cheng, were named on Sept. 30, selected from an eight-book shortlist announced earlier that month. The books were chosen by a jury comprised of Greenwood, historians Ned Blackhawk and Barbara Weinstein, and BBC journalist and author Fergal Keane.

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