MacMillan Scholar and History Lecturer Brendan A. Shanahan Wins National Prize for Study of US Citizenship and Immigration

Brendan A. Shanahan, an associate research scholar at the Yale MacMillan Center Committee on Canadian Studies and a lecturer in the Department of History, has received the 2026 Organization of American Historians’ Ellis W. Hawley Prize for his book, Disparate Regimes: Nativist Politics, Alienage Law, and Citizenship Rights in the United States, 1865–1965 (Oxford University Press, 2025). The prize honors the “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.” The Organization of American Historians, the leading professional association for scholars of United States history, will recognize the award at a ceremony on April 17.

In Disparate Regimes, Shanahan argues that debates over immigration and citizenship rights cannot be understood solely through federal policy. While immigration law increasingly took shape at the national level by the late nineteenth century, his book shows that state governments remained central to defining and enforcing the rights of noncitizen immigrants vis-à-vis those of US citizens in the century between the Civil War and the civil rights era. By bringing states back into the story, Shanahan traces how policies aimed at immigrants also shaped broader contests over political inclusion, such as debates over women’s suffrage and independent citizenship, the rights of nonwhite Americans, and who counted for representation.

The project grew out of questions Shanahan first pursued in graduate school at UC Berkeley, when he became interested in citizenship not only as a legal status but as a set of rights shaped by politics and law. Influenced by political theorist Judith Shklar, whose work emphasized that in the United States after the Civil War, full citizenship was often understood through political participation and economic independence, Shanahan began to examine how “citizens’ rights” functioned in practice. As he notes, rights such as voting and access to paid labor have historically been central to inclusive visions of citizenship. These rights have also been restricted or denied to noncitizens.

Shanahan also challenges the assumption that restrictions framed as protections for citizens reliably expand opportunity. In an interview, he stressed that “attempts to circumscribe immigrants’ access to work—from backbreaking blue-collar jobs to highly paid professional employment—might be framed rhetorically as efforts to defend citizens’ rights,” he added, “very rarely in this time period did they truly help to expand employment opportunities to US-born women or racially marginalized American citizens. More often, they aligned with other forms of exclusion or outright discrimination.” By tracing how these policies operated, Disparate Regimes offers historical context for evaluating important topics in contemporary public debate.

Shanahan came to Yale in 2019 as a postdoctoral associate with the Yale Center for the Study of Representative Institutions (YCRI), a global program within the MacMillan Center. He later became an associate research scholar affiliated with the Committee on Canadian Studies. He credits Yale’s community, especially the History Department, YCRI, and the Canadian Studies program, with supporting his research as well as his teaching.

Looking ahead, Shanahan plans to build on and shift his research focus to a narrower time period, examining a late nineteenth-century nativist movement shaped by transnational currents. His next project will examine how Canadian-style politics—particularly those structured around anti-Catholicism—traveled across borders and were adapted in the United States. By comparing how such ideas, subnational politics, and laws developed in both countries, Shanahan aims to better understand the shared political dynamics that shaped North American debates over immigration and belonging.

With the upcoming 250th anniversary of the United States and ongoing national conversations about immigration, Shanahan’s work is especially timely, offering critical historical perspective on how definitions of citizenship and rights have evolved and continue to shift in and around the United States.