Name:  Anne Cheng ’85

Title:  Professor, Associate Chair, Department of English

Department:  English and the Center for African American Studies

Education:

• B.A. in English, Princeton
• M.A. in Creative Writing and English Literature, Stanford University
• Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley 
  

Number of Years at Princeton: 3

Currently Teaching: 

• AAS 395/ENG 352 - Race and the Pornological                

Research: Professor Cheng specializes in race studies and psychoanalytic theory and works in twentieth-century American literature, with a special focus on Asian American and African American literatures.  She has always been interested in understanding the relationship between aesthetics and politics; she has largely focused on how writers and artists of color contribute to the general understanding of racial injury—not by simply reflecting that fact, but by exploring the complex paths and contradictions of racism and the education of desire that have affected both dominant and minority subjects in American national culture.  Her current research has taken her ongoing preoccupation with the intersection of politics and aesthetics in the direction of visual culture.

Prof. Cheng's new book, which is called Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface, is also highly interdisciplinary, drawing from the fields of performance, art, and architecture.  This book studies the performer Josephine Baker as a way to trace the story of an unexpected but ardent conversation between the invention of a modernist style and the theatricalization of black skin at the turn of the twentieth century.  Stepping outside of the platitudes surrounding this iconic figure, Professor Cheng argues that Baker's famed nakedness must be understood within larger philosophic and aesthetic debates about, and desire for, "pure surface" that crystallized at the convergence of modern art, architecture, machinery, and philosophy.

Princeton Community Involvement: Prof. Cheng advises both graduate and undergraduate students. She says she really enjoys the one-to-one working relationships because that is how mentoring can be done and how the teaching of writing can be best achieved.

Hobbies: She loves spending time with her family; they are her most beloved anchors and distractions.  She is also an avid student of dance, and thus takes dance lessons three times a week.

Web site: http://english.princeton.edu/faculty/func,fullview/facultyid,42/