Center for Ethnic Studies | History of Art Lecture - Anne Anlin Cheng
"Ornamentalism: A Feminist Theory of the Yellow Woman"
The first ten graduate students, six undergraduates, and four staff or faculty who register for Professor Cheng’s talk will receive copies of the book, Ornamentalism.
Bio:
Anne Anlin Cheng is Professor of English, and affiliated faculty in the Program in American Studies, the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, and the Committee on Film Studies. She is an interdisciplinary and comparative race scholar who focuses on the uneasy intersection between politics and aesthetics, drawing from literary theory, race and gender studies, film and architectural theory, legal studies, psychoanalysis, and critical food studies. She works primarily with twentieth-century American literature and visual culture with special focus on Asian American and African American literatures. She is the author of The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief(link is external); Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface(link is external); and, most recently, Ornamentalism(link is external). Her work has appeared in journals such as Critical Inquiry, Representations, PMLA, Camera Obscura, Differences, among others. She is also a contributor to New York Times(link is external), The Atlantic(link is external), Los Angeles Review of Books(link is external), and Huffington Post(link is external).
Cheng received her B.A. in English and Creative Writing at Princeton University, her Masters in English and Creative Writing from Stanford University, and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from University of California at Berkeley. Prior to returning to Princeton as a faculty, she taught at Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley.
Cheng is the founder and organizer of the public conversation series Critical Encounters that promotes dialogue between art and theory and encourages cross-disciplinary conversations on topics of social justice. Past programs include a collaborative student reenactment of the Minoru Yasui Trial, with Appellate Court Judge Denny Chin; a screening of new works by internationally renowned filmmaker Isaac Julien; a conversation between contemporary experimental playwrights Jorge Ignacio Cortinas and Young Jean Lee, and more.
Cheng is currently working with colleagues in American Studies to create a new experiment in research and pedagogical partnership called the American Studies Collaboratory(link is external), a site for nurturing cross-campus research affinities. The Col(LAB), for short, creates pop-up, multicultural, and multi-generational labs that bring together scholars and students from the humanities, the social sciences, and the sciences to explore how issues such as identity or citizenship shape and are shaped by law, the arts, literature, food, sexuality, space, and more.
