Thursday, April 16, 2026-Brendan A. Shanahan, a MacMillan Scholar and history lecturer at Yale, has been awarded a national prize for his research on U.S. citizenship and immigration policy.
The recognition comes from the Organization of American Historians, which honored his book for its contribution to understanding how citizenship rights and immigration laws evolved in the United States.
Shanahan’s award-winning work, Disparate Regimes: Nativist Politics, Alienage Law, and Citizenship Rights in the United States, 1865–1965, examines how state-level policies helped shape the meaning of citizenship across the country.
Rather than focusing only on federal law, the study highlights how individual states played a major role in defining who could access rights such as voting, employment, and public benefits, and how those decisions created uneven systems of inclusion and exclusion.
The prize underscores growing scholarly interest in how immigration debates are shaped by both national and local politics, and how historical policy frameworks continue to influence modern discussions on belonging and rights.
Shanahan’s research is being recognized as a significant contribution to the field of American political and legal history, particularly in how it reframes the role of state governments in shaping citizenship over time.
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