Hardeep Dhillon (she/her/hers) is Assistant Professor of Asian American History and a core faculty member in the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research examines the history of immigration to the United States, with a particular focus on the laws and legal practices shaping immigrant lives. Her current book project investigates the history of children’s rights, emphasizing the experiences of birthright children born to non-citizen parents. Specifically, it traces the development of U.S. law from the late nineteenth through the twentieth centuries, demonstrating how segregation among children in education, voting, and housing became entrenched even as overt attempts to dismantle birthright citizenship failed. Further details of her research, teaching, and publications can be found on her faculty webpage.
Hardeep Dhillon
Wolf Humanities Center Penn Faculty Fellow
2025—2026 Forum on Truth
Hardeep Dhillon
Assistant Professor of Asian American History
America's Children and the History of Immigration
This work focuses on truth claims within the realm of legal history, examining how legal records produced by the courts and legal infrastructure of the United States create their own narratives about the past. It argues that court records and state documents obscure the larger political and legal implications in some of the nation’s most significant cases. Specifically, the scholarship explores the history of attacks on birthright citizenship in the United States and their narration through legal “facts” and “truth.” Birthright Children and America’s Modern Immigrant Family explores a range of archival records, including family documents, to examine the historical development of a growing legal regime that developed to entrench segregation among children in schools, at the ballot box, and in home ownership as efforts to thwart birthright citizenship were defeated. It underscores that the legal truths of court records share only one interpretation of the nation’s history.