Allison Varzally, Ph.D.

Biography

Allison Varzally is a Professor of History at California State University, Fullerton interested in the histories of Immigration, Multiracial Relations, Asian Americans, and the American West. She teaches a range of courses and often serves as one of the graduate advisers for the history department. Her first book, Making a Non-White America: Californians Coloring Outside Ethnic Lines (University of California Press), examined the social, cultural and political interactions among diverse minorities in shared neighborhoods throughout the state that fostered multiethnic civil rights activism and the collapse of legal discrimination in education, housing, and marriage soon after World War II.  In 2008, Varzally won the Immigration and Ethnic History Society's Theodore Saloutos Award for best book in immigration history. Currently, she directs an oral and archival history project that examines Southern California’s food culture and commercial restaurants and serves as book review editor for the Southern California Quarterly, a journal dedicated to the history of the Far West and its associated regions. She has published articles that contemplate patterns of intermarriage, Asian International Adoption, approaches to teaching California History, and the racial turn in immigration history. Her second book,  Children of Reunion: Vietnamese Adoptions and the Politics of Family Migrations   (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) explores the lives of and stories told about Vietnamese children and their American and Vietnamese families to better understand the Vietnamese diasapora and changing ideas of U.S. citizenship in an era of heightened debate about national purpose and responsibility in the world.  She enjoys hiking, baseball, and the beach.