Dr. Sue Fawn Chung was born in Los Angeles, California and graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, Harvard University, and the University of California, Berkeley. She began teaching history at UNLV in 1976 and retired in 2015 as professor emerita. She has served as UNLV Director of International Programs, Chairperson of UNLV History Department, member of the Nevada Board of Museums and History, Clark County Asian American Commissioner, National Endowment for the Humanities Grants Committee, National Trust for Historic Preservation Advisor, and consultant for the U.S. Forest Service. She has assisted in. numerous museum and media presentations, including serving as executive producer of Vegas PBS, “Island Mountain Days.” She won the Bancroft Award for one of her books the Schmeidel Award for Community Seervice, the Lion’s Club Outstanding Educator Award, and the Nevada Humanities Outstanding Nevadan Award, as well as other recognition.
She has written extensively on Chinese Americans, including The Chinese in Nevada (2011), In Pursuit of Gold: Chinese American Miners and Merchants in the American West (2011), The Chinese in the Woods: Logging and Lumbering. In the American West (2015), and more recently, “Tracking the Chinese Railroad Workers in Two Nevada Towns: Winnemucca and Elko,” (2017), “Chinese Exclusion, the First Bureau of Immigration, and the 1905 Special Chinese Census,” (2018), “An Ocean Apart: Chinese American Burial Rituals,” (2020), and “Out of the Shadows and into Politics: The Experience of Chinese American Women in the American West,” (2021). She currently is working on a book manuscript on Chinese railroad labor contractors.