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 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 first book, Disparate Regimes: Nativist Politics, Alienage Law, and Citizenship Rights in the United States, 1865-1965 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2025) comes out next winter (online) and spring (hardcover and paperback).  Disparate Regimes shows how the rights of immigrants in the United States were primarily determined in the realms of state politics and alienage law from the late nineteenth- to the mid-twentieth centuries, with lawmakers, voters, and jurists regularly debating whether noncitizens should vote, count as part of the population for the purposes of representation, work in public and publicly funded employment, or obtain professional licensure within their respective states.  It argues that the contestation over nativist state politics and alienage policies produced veritable disparate regimes of citizenship rights in the U.S. political economy on a state-by-state basis and helped to invent and concretize the idea that citizenship rights meant citizen-only rights in law, practice, and popular perception for immigrants and native-born Americans alike in the century between the American Civil War and the Civil Rights era.

Shanahan’s work has previously appeared in The Catholic Historical Review, Law and History Review, and the Washington Post, among other publications. His 2021 LHR article zoomed into one particularly fractious and hitherto lost-to-history episode in US-Canadian relations (later covered, albeit more briefly, in Disparate Regimes), “A “Practically American” Canadian Woman Confronts a United States Citizen-Only Hiring Law: Katharine Short and the California Alien Teachers Controversy of 1915.”  His recent CHR article is the first publication resulting from his new, ongoing research project with Yale Canadian Studies about the transnational politics of anti-Catholicism in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States and Canada, “The Late Nineteenth-Century North American Catholic Schools Question: Tangled Disputes over Catholic Public Education in Manitoba and Minnesota” (2024). 

To reach him, please email: Brendan.shanahan@yale.edu.