Ordinary Disasters: How I Stopped Being a Model Minority
| Dates: | 13 May 2026 |
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| Times: | 17:00 - 18:30 |
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| What is it: | Lecture |
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| Organiser: | School of Arts, Languages and Cultures |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, External researchers, Alumni, Current University students, General public |
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In this public lecture, EACW John Edward Taylor Fellow Prof. Anne Anlin Cheng will be reading from her most recent book, Ordinary Disasters, and reflecting more broadly on how this collection of essays—traversing memoir, cultural criticism, and history—meditates on race, gender, aging, and contemporary Asian American identity, and relates to the foundational work she’s done across her career in the fields of critical race studies, modernist studies, and gender and sexuality studies.
Biography
Anne Anlin Cheng is the Louis W. Fairchild ’24 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 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.
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Lecture Theatre
Samuel Alexander Building
Manchester
