Jackie Wu

Jackie is a PhD candidate in History. Her dissertation explores immigration, disease control, and imperial expansion through the history of leprosy in the United States around the turn of the twentieth century. At Yale, her work has been generously supported by the Dean’s Emerging Scholar Fellowship, the Elias E. Manuelidis Memorial Fund Research Grant, the John F. Enders Research Grant, and the John Morton Blum Fellowship for Graduate Research in American History and Culture. She is a 2026-27 Research Fellow at the Consortium for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine.

Prior to graduate school, she earned a BA in History and BS in Business Administration from Carnegie Mellon University. Her senior thesis, “The Chinese Labor Experiment: Contract Workers in the Northeastern United States, 1870-1880,” won Carnegie Mellon’s Dietrich Humanities Prize, the Pennsylvania Historical Association’s William A. Pencak Award, and the American Historical Association’s Raymond J. Cunningham Prize. She is further developing her undergraduate research on Pittsburgh’s Chinatown for public humanities projects.

On campus, she is a head graduate affiliate of Timothy Dwight College and coordinator of the Asian American Studies Working Group. She has previously served as a department representative in the Graduate Student Assembly and co-president of the Andrews Society. She welcomes questions about the PhD program or anything else mentioned above.