Ordinary Disasters: A Reading & Conversation w/ Anne Anlin Cheng

Anne Anlin Cheng (she/her) is Louis W. Fairchild ’24 Professor of English and Acting Director for the Program in Asian American Studies. She is a comparative race scholar whose research focuses on the uneasy intersection between politics and aesthetics and author of four books: The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief; the award-winning Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface; Ornamentalism, which served as a conceptual inspiration for several art exhibitions, including “Monstrous Beauty” at The Metropolitan Museum in 2025; and, most recently, Ordinary Disasters: How I Stopped Being a Model Minority, a book of personal/cultural essays. Her writing can also be found in journals such as The Nation, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, and more. She was Scholar-in-Residence at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2024-2025. 

Sien Rivera, MD (they/them) is Assistant Program Director of the Prisma Health Midlands/University of South Carolina General Psychiatry residency program, and Assistant Clinical Professor at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine. They are a psychoanalytic psychotherapist that is double boarded in General and Child/Adolescent Psychiatry. They are a former fellow of the American Psychoanalytic Association, former chair of the American Psychoanalytic Association's Committee on Gender and Sexuality, and a winner of the Ralph Roughton Paper Award. They currently serve as a member of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry’s LGBTQIA Committee. They write and present nationally and internationally on topics related to gender, sexuality, and new technologies. 

Mary Kim Brewster, PhD (she/her) is an executive editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, and the guest editor of the special edition of Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 24(40): “On Being Asian in America”. She is a clinical psychologist, faculty member of The Asian American Center for Psychoanalysis, and the Director of the Serious Mental Illness and the Family Project at the Ackerman Institute for the Family. She supervises in the Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology at City University of New York and has a private practice in New York.