Professor Dr. Brendan Shanahan

Biography

Brendan 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, as well as comparative 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. Shanahan earned his PhD and MA from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was an active member of Cal’s Canadian Studies Program, and received his BA from McGill University in Montreal. His book, 'Disparate Regimes: Nativist Politics, Alienage Law, and Citizenship Rights in the United States, 1865-1965' (New York: Oxford University Press, 2025), will be released in winter (online) and spring (hardcover and paperback). This work demonstrates that the citizenship rights of immigrants in the United States were primarily determined within the realms of state politics and alienage law throughout the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. He argues that the contestation of nativist state politics and alienage policies produced a veritable disparate regime of citizenship rights in the U.S. political economy on a state-by-state basis, significantly shaping perceptions of citizenship rights for both immigrants and native-born Americans alike through the centuries of the American Civil War and Civil Rights era.

Research Interests