Education

Ph.D., United States History, University of California at Berkeley
M.A., Jurisprudence and Social Policy, University of California at Berkeley
B.A., College Scholar, Cornell University

Biography

S. Deborah Kang is Associate Professor of History and John L. Nau III Associate Professor of the History and Principles of Democracy in the Corcoran Department of History and the Karsh Institute of Democracy at the University of Virginia.

Her first book, The INS on the Line: Making Immigration Law on the US-Mexico Border, 1917-1954 (Oxford University Press, 2017) traces the history of US immigration agencies on the US-Mexico border and earned six awards and accolades, including the Henry Adams Prize from the Society for History in the Federal Government, the Theodore Saloutos Book Award from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize, the W. Turrentine Jackson Award from the Western History Association, and the Americo Paredes Book Award for Best Nonfiction Book on Chicano/a, Mexican American and/or Latino/a Studies. It was also recognized as a Finalist for the 2018 Weber-Clements Book Prize by the Western History Association.

In 2025, Kang was the recipient of the inaugural Award for Contributions to Public Policy from the Organization of American Historians. The Award recognized her "extensive efforts to make immigration policy more humane and equitable" through the application of her scholarly expertise to the most pressing immigration law and policy issues of the day.

Her current research includes a second monograph on the history of immigration relief from the late nineteenth century to the present, a co-edited anthology, Hidden Histories of Unauthorized Migrations from Europe to the United States (University of Illinois Press, forthcoming 2025), and a new history of the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act. Her work has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Huntington Library, and the Clements Center for Southwest Studies.