Speaker Bios
ANNE ANLIN CHENG (she/her) 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 at Princeton University. She is a comparative race scholar whose research focuses on the uneasy intersection between politics and aesthetics. Her work draws widely from literary theory, visual culture, Modernism, race and gender studies, film and architectural theory, legal studies, and psychoanalysis. She works primarily with twentieth-century American, Asian American, and African American literatures and visual cultures.
She is the author of three books: The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief, Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface, and, most recently, Ornamentalism. Her scholarship has inspired collaborations with artists, group exhibitions in New York and served as a major impetus for a show on chinoiserie at the Metropolitan Museum scheduled for 2025.
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 Princeton, she has 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. She is one of the founders of a new experimental research platform at Princeton called the American Studies Collaboratory—the AMS Col(LAB)—that nurtures cross-campus research affinities. The AMS Col(LAB) 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, sexuality, space, and more.
Cheng’s essay writing can also be found in The Nation, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Washington Post, and The Huffington Post.
Her new book of personal essays Ordinary Disasters is forthcoming from Alfred A. Knopf in September 2024. She is currently Scholar-in-Residence at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
NATALIE CHIH-LU HUNG (she/her) is a second-generation Taiwanese American clinical psychologist and writer. She received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from City University of New York and her B.A. in Film Studies from Yale University. She has worked in a variety of settings, including the Trauma Disorders Program at Sheppard Pratt, the VA Connecticut Healthcare System, the Johns Hopkins University Counseling Center, and The Addiction Institute of New York.
As a clinician and writer, Dr. Hung integrates animist, relational, and trauma-informed perspectives, and strives to transform stories that hold people captive into stories that set them free. Her specialties include intergenerational and collective trauma, dissociation, and complex PTSD; Asian American racialization; the intersections between personal and social identities; and grief. Her dissertation Boundaries and Belonging: Asian America, Psychology, and Psychoanalysis explored Asian American racialization, subjectivities, and implications for clinical practice. Her writing has appeared in The Keeping Room, Psychoanalytic Psychology, ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action, and Death Studies.
She runs groups for Asian American women to heal from gendered racial trauma and is currently writing a self-help memoir about her own healing during the COVID-19 pandemic.
She is based in Cambridge, United Kingdom and works remotely with people in Maryland and New York.