Catherine Ceniza Choy is Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. The daughter of Filipino immigrants, Catherine was born and raised in New York City. She received her Ph.D. in History from UCLA in 1998 and her B.A. in History from Pomona College in 1991. She chaired Cal's Department of Ethnic Studies (2012-2015, 2018-2019), served as Associate Dean of College of Letters & Science’s Division of Undergraduate Studies (2019-2021), and was a member of the Faculty Leadership Academy’s inaugural cohort in 2019. Her scholarly specialties include Asian American history, Filipino American studies, race, gender, and migration, nursing history, and adoption studies. She is the author of the book, Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History(2003), which explored how and why the Philippines became the leading exporter of professional nurses to the United States. Empire of Care received the 2003 American Journal of Nursing History and Public Policy Book Award and the 2005 Association for Asian American Studies History Book Award. Itis included in the Social Science Research Council’s #coronavirussyllabus.
An engaged public scholar, Catherine has been interviewed in many media outlets, including ABC 2020, TheAtlantic, CNN, Los Angeles Times, NBC News, New York Times, ProPublica, San Francisco Chronicle, Time, and Vox, on the disproportionate toll of COVID-19 on Filipino nurses in the United States, anti-Asian, coronavirus-related violence, and racism and misogyny in the March 16 Atlanta murders. Her second book, Global Families: A History of Asian International Adoption in America(2013), unearths the little-known historical origins of Asian international adoption in the United States beginning with the post-World War II presence of the U.S. military in Asia.
Catherine is the editor of the Brill book series Gendering the Trans-Pacific World, which explores the gendered nature of the Pacific World by focusing on diaspora, empire, and race. Its inaugural volume is the anthology, Gendering the Trans-Pacific World(2017), which Catherine co-edited with Judy Tzu-Chun Wu. Catherine teaches Asian American history courses at UC Berkeley and beyond, having served as an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer (2017-2020) and a Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer at Yonsei University (2015-2016). She is writing the book “Asian American Histories of the United States” (Beacon Press, under contract), and a book featuring biographies of Filipino American women, tentatively titled “In No Man’s Shadow: The Filipino Woman in America and the World.”
Read more:
Professor Choy on Why are there so many Filipino nurses in the U.S.?
Berkeley Conversations, "The long history and present surge of anti-Asian violence"