Ourselves in History—Narrating Grief in Asian America: A Conversation with Anne Anlin Cheng

Professor of English at Princeton University, 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, comparative race scholar who focuses on the uneasy intersection between politics and aesthetics. She is the author of four books: The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief; Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface, which won Honorable Mention for Best Book from the Modernist Studies Association; Ornamentalism, which served as an impetus for the Metropolitan Museum’s upcoming show on chinoiserie, opening in 2025; and her new book of essays, Ordinary Disasters: How I Stopped Being a Model Minority, from Pantheon Books

An assistant professor of philosophy at Vassar College with an affiliation with Women, Feminist, and Queer Studies. Her research focuses on racial and gendered subject formation, and she draws from critical social theory, psychoanalysis, and decolonial thought in her work. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Washington Post, n+1, The Baffler, The Point, The Believer, frieze, BOMB, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere