Anne Anlin Cheng is professor of English and affiliated faculty in the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies and the Committee on Film Studies. She is an interdisciplinary scholar who works at the intersection of aesthetics and politics, drawing from literary theory, critical race studies, film theory, feminist theory, and psychoanalysis. She works primarily with 20-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: Assimilation, Psychoanalysis, and Hidden Grief (Oxford University Press, 2001), a study of the notion of racial grief at the intersection of culture, history, and law. Her second book, Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (Oxford University Press, 2013), excavates the story of the unexpected intimacy between modern architectural theory and the invention of a modernist style and the conceptualization of Black skin at the turn of the 20th century.

Cheng’s latest book, Ornamentalism (Oxford University Press, 2019), offers a feminist theory of the yellow woman and suggests that embedded within the extensive archive of Euro-American Orientalism is an archaeology of synthetic personhood that is integral to the ideal of modern, organic, western personhood. Cheng is currently working on another project on race at the intersection of food and animal studies.

Cheng received her B.A. in English and creative writing from Princeton University, her masters in English and creative writing from Stanford University, and her Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to returning to Princeton to join the 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, which promotes dialogue between art and theory and encourages cross-disciplinary conversations on the shared topic of social justice. Past programs include a collaborative student reenactment of the Minoru Yasui Trial, with Judge Denny Chin, which highlights the roles of Asian Americans in American legal history as well as explores the enduring question of civil rights and the American Constitution; a screening of new works by internationally renowned filmmaker Isaac Julien; a conversation between contemporary experimental playwrights Jorge Ignacio Cortinas and Young Jean Lee.

Cheng is now working with colleagues in American studies to create American Studies Collaboratory, a new experiment in research and pedagogical partnership for nurturing cross-campus research affinities, a multicultural lab of sorts that explores how issues such as identity or citizenship shape and are shaped by law, the arts, literature, food, sexuality, space, and more.