Anne Anlin Cheng is Professor of English, affiliated faculty in the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies and on the Committee on Film Studies, and former director of the Program in American Studies. She is an interdisciplinary, comparative race scholar who focuses on the uneasy intersection between politics and aesthetics, drawing widely from literary and visual studies, race and gender studies, film and architectural theory, legal studies, and psychoanalysis. She works primarily with twentieth-century American literature and visual culture with special focus on Asian American and African American literatures.

She is the 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 an impetus for the Metropolitan Museum’s 2025 exhibition entitled “Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Retake on Chinoiserie”; and, most recently, a book of personal/cultural essays Ordinary Disasters: How I Stopped Being a Model Minority. Her writings have appeared in critical journals such as Camera Obscura, Critical Inquiry, Differences, PMLA, Representations, among others. She has contributed to The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Yale Review, Hyperallergic, and more. She was the 2023-2024 Scholar-in-Residence at the Museum of Modern Art, NY.

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 returning to Princeton as a 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 that promotes dialogue between art and theory and encourages cross-disciplinary conversations on topics of social justice. She is also one of the founders of a new experiment in research and pedagogical partnership called the American Studies Collaboratory, a site for nurturing cross-campus research affinities. The Col(LAB), for short, 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, food, sexuality, space, and more.