Brendan Shanahan

Brendan A. Shanahan is a Lecturer in the Department of History and an Associate Research Scholar at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University. He teaches courses on (North) American immigration and citizenship policy and comparative US and Canadian political and legal history. Prior to joining Canadian Studies, he served as a postdoctoral associate at Yale’s Center for the Study of Representative Institutions. Before that, Shanahan earned his PhD and MA in US History from the University of California, Berkeley (where he was an active member in Cal’s Canadian Studies Program), and received his BA from McGill University in Montreal.

His research examines and connects topics such as: immigration federalism, citizenship law, state politics, US–Canada relations, and nativist movements. Shanahan’s first book, Disparate Regimes: Nativist Politics, Alienage Law, and Citizenship Rights in the United States, 1865–1965 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2025) was awarded the 2026 Ellis W. Hawley Prize by the Organization of American Historians for “best book-length historical study of the political economy, politics, or institutions of the United States, in its domestic or international affairs, from the Civil War to the present.” His 2021 Law and History Review article, “A “Practically American” Canadian Woman Confronts a United States Citizen-Only Hiring Law: Katharine Short and the California Alien Teachers Controversy of 1915,” previews several of the book’s subjects and arguments.

Shanahan has begun research on a second book project, tentatively entitled, “A North American Movement: Canadianizing the Politics of Anti-Catholicism in the United States, 1875–1914.”  His most recent peer-reviewed publications explore different facets of that project. “Fears of Conspiracies at Home and Abroad: The American Protective Association, a “New Fenian” Threat, and an Anglo–North American War Scare in 1895,” will come out soon in the Journal of American Ethnic History. His article, “The Late Nineteenth-Century North American Catholic Schools Question: Tangled Disputes over Catholic Public Education in Manitoba and Minnesota” was published by the Catholic Historical Review in 2024. 

He has also authored works that have appeared in the American Review of Canadian Studies, Nuova Atlantide, TIME (Made by History), and the Washington Post (Made by History), among other outlets. He currently serves as Chair of the Outstanding Dissertation Award Committee of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society (IEHS) and as Vice President of the Middle Atlantic and New England Council for Canadian Studies (MANECCS).