Vivian Yan-Gonzalez is a historian of race and politics in the 20th-century United States. Her current book project examines the first generation of Chinese and Japanese American voters in California, tracing their political ideas, strategies, and coalitions from their emergence in the 1920s through their maturity in the post-World War II years. She is also working on a digital humanities project to gather, map, and analyze historical Asian American voter data. Her writing has been published in Amerasia Journal, Theory & Event, the Pacific Historical Review, and the Washington Post. Her work has been recognized by the Western History Association and by the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association. She was the recipient of a 2014 Fulbright award to Hong Kong and a 2023 National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship. 

An Orange County native, Professor Yan-Gonzalez was a Mellon Mays fellow at the University of Southern California and received her Ph.D. in History from Stanford University in 2022. She was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, before joining Chapman University.