Cindy I-Fen Cheng
Assistant Professor

eMail: cicheng@wisc.edu
Phone: (608)265-2522
Office: 5106 Mosse Humanities
Mailbox: 5022 Mosse Humanities

Website: http://polyglot.lss.wisc.edu/aasp

Office Hours: On Leave

Education: PhD: University of California, Irvine; MA: University of California, Irvine; BA: University of California, Los Angeles

Bio Sketch:

I completed my doctoral degree at the University of California, Irvine in History with a Graduate Feminist Emphasis and an emphasis in Critical Theory. Before attending graduate school, I worked as a GED Instructor/Educational Coordinator for a HUD funded program called PACE/SIPA YouthBuild which provided on-site job training and GED instruction for at-risk youths between the ages of 18-25 in the downtown Los Angeles area. I earned my B.S. from the University of California, Los Angeles with a double major in Physiological Science and Asian American Studies.

Research Interests:

My research and teaching interests in broad terms deal with ideas of national belonging and un-belonging. These interests lead me to rigorously inquire after the ways race, gender, class, sexuality, and nationality structures and organizes our society, critically determining who gets to be included in our understanding of the American, who are excluded, and why for many to un-belong to the U.S. nation-state is in fact politically liberating.

To better develop my interests, I examine the interplay among race, gender, class, sexuality, and nationality within thematic contexts such as: U.S. cold war culture, Asian American history and culture, American Studies within a transnational framework, and discourses on citizenship.

I approach my objects of study through an interdisciplinary framework, with an emphasis on cultural studies, critical race studies, and discursive analysis. At UW-Madison, I am institutionally located in the Department of History and the Program in Asian American Studies.

Currently, I am working on a book manuscript that explores discourses on U.S. national belonging during the early Cold War period from 1946 to 1965. As Soviet propaganda targeted U.S. racism in order to undermine the credibility of U.S. democracy, incorporating racial and ethnic minorities became imperative to establishing the superiority of American democracy over communism. Negotiating racial belongings therefore emerged a key concern of U.S. Cold War politics. Through the historical contexts of suburbanization, the culture of the first, and anti-communist hysteria, I develop the ways Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Blacks, Mexicans and ethnic whites were differentially incorporated in early Cold War U.S. This examination not only highlights how race is defined relationally but also how it intersects with ideas of gender, class, sexuality, and nation to structure national belonging. As many of my examples are drawn from events that take place in Los Angeles, this study foregrounds Los Angeles to be a critical site where notions of race and cold war democracy were negotiated.

Selected Publications:

• “Identities and Places: On Writing the History of Filipinotown, Los Angeles” Journal of Asian American Studies 12:1 (February 2009): 1-33.
• "Out of Chinatown and into the Suburbs: Chinese Americans and the Politics of Cultural Citizenship in Early Cold War America," American Quarterly 58:4 (December 2006): 1067-1090.

Awards:

• UW-Madison TRIO Teaching Award: The Dr. Brenda Pfaehler Award of Excellence; 2005-2007

Courses Taught:

Undergraduate Colloquia:

• History 160 - Asian American Studies:  Asian American History:  Movement and Dislocation - Syllabus 2008 (pdf)
• History 161 - Asian American Studies:  Asian American History:  Settlement and National Belonging
• History 221 - Explorations in American History - Topics: "Asian American History"; "Race and Popular Culture "
• History 600 - Life History Narratives in the U.S.

Graduate Courses:

• History 901 - Asian American History and Culture - Syllabus 2008 (pdf)