Brendan Shanahan

Brendan A. Shanahan is a scholar of 19th- and 20th-century North American history. He works on the socio-legal and political development of U.S. immigration and citizenship policy. Shanahan is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Center for the Study of Representative Institutions at the MacMillan Center and Lecturer in the History Department of Yale University. He received his PhD (2018) and MA (2013) from UC Berkeley and his BA from McGill University (2011). His dissertation, “Making Modern American Citizenship: Citizens, Aliens, and Rights, 1865-1965,” argues that modern U.S. citizenship emerged in a series of late-19th to mid-20th century disputes over the (often increasingly exclusive) political and economic rights of American citizens vis-à-vis resident noncitizens. It explores how U.S. women won the franchise while noncitizens lost it, the inclusion or exclusion of noncitizens from state and federal redistricting policies, “citizen only” restrictions on public and publicly funded blue-collar work, and noncitizens’ efforts to overcome barriers to professional licensure on the basis of nationality.