Historian
Hardeep Dhillon (pronouns are she/her/hers) is currently Assistant Professor in Asian American History and core faculty in the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Dhillon’s research focuses on the history of immigration to the United States, and the laws and legal practices that shape immigrant lives. Professor Dhillon’s current book project examines the legal construction of the mixed-status family, focusing on how legal transformations have emerged through contests over the rights of children born to non-citizen parents.
Prior to joining the faculty at Penn, Professor Dhillon earned her doctorate in History from Harvard University, where she also completed a secondary field in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the American Bar Foundation. Trained in both modern U.S. and Asian history, her scholarly work reflects a deep commitment to multilingual archival research, conducted across dozens of archives on three continents.
Her publications span the histories of anti-Asian violence, immigrants' access to legal redress, naturalization and legal rights, and the legal and political structures that have shaped modern systems of compensation and reparations. More recently, her research has turned toward family history and the legal activism of immigrant families, with a particular focus on the contested rights of children born to non-citizen parents.
Historian
Hardeep Dhillon (pronouns are she/her/hers) is currently Assistant Professor in Asian American History and core faculty in the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Dhillon’s research focuses on the history of immigration to the United States, and the laws and legal practices that shape immigrant lives. Professor Dhillon’s current book project, tentatively titled America’s Modern Immigrant Family, studies the legal construction of the mixed-status family. She is increasingly interested in the history of children's rights, particularly those of birthright children born to non-citizen parents.
Prior to joining the faculty at Penn, Professor Dhillon earned her doctorate in History from Harvard University, where she also completed a secondary field in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She subsequently held a postdoctoral fellowship at the American Bar Foundation. Trained in both modern U.S. and Asian history, her scholarship reflects a deep commitment to multilingual archival research conducted across dozens of archives on three continents.
Her publications explore the histories of anti-Asian violence, immigrants’ access to legal redress, naturalization and legal rights, and the legal and political frameworks that have shaped modern systems of compensation and reparations. More recently, her research has turned toward family history and the legal activism of immigrant families, with particular attention to the contested rights of children born to non-citizen parents.
Affiliations
Professor Dhillon is a member of the Penn Migration Initiative Executive Committee and Affiliate at the Center for the Study of Ethnicity, Race, and Immigration at Penn. Professor Dhillon is also an Affiliate Scholar at the American Bar Foundation and the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute at Harvard University.
Professor Dhillon’s work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Fulbright Program, American Historical Association, American Society of Legal History, and Library of Congress. She serves on the George E. Pozzetta Dissertation Award Committee with the Immigration and Ethnic History Society and the Standing Committee for the Annual Meeting for the American Society of Legal History.