Cindy I-Fen Cheng

Biography

I am a historian of post-1945 United States with interests in immigration, citizenship, and Asian American history and culture. I am the award-winning author of Citizens of Asian America: Democracy and Race during the Cold War (2013) and editor of The Routledge Handbook of Asian American Studies (2016). My articles have appeared in the American Quarterly, Journal of Asian American Studies, Modern American History, and other academic journals and anthologies. My current book project, Skid Row Refuge: Central American Asylum Seekers and the 1980s Homelessness Crisis in the United States (under contract with University of Washington Press) examines how the resettlement of Central American asylum seekers in Skid Row, Los Angeles reshaped the meaning of homelessness and its advocacy during the 1980s.

Education

Ph.D., University of California, Irvine
M.A., University of California, Irvine
B.S., University of California, Los Angeles

Books

The Routledge Handbook of Asian American Studies

Cindy I-Fen Cheng (Editor). The Routledge Handbook of Asian American Studies. Routledge, 2016.

The Routledge Handbook of Asian American Studies brings together leading scholars and scholarship to capture the state of the field of Asian American Studies, as a generation of researchers have expanded the field with new paradigms and methodological tools. Inviting readers to consider new understandings of the historical work done in the past decades and the place of Asian Americans in a larger global context, this ground-breaking volume illuminates how research in the field of Asian American Studies has progressed. Previous work in the field has focused on establishing a place for Asian Americans within American history. This volume engages more contemporary research, which draws on new archives, art, literature, film, and music, to examine how Asian Americans are redefining their national identities, and to show how race interacts with gender, sexuality, class, and the built environment, to reveal the diversity of the United States. Organized into five parts, and addressing a multitude of interdisciplinary areas of interest to Asian American scholars, it covers: a reframing of key themes such as transnationality, postcolonialism, and critical race theory U.S. imperialism and its impact on Asian Americans war and displacement the garment industry Asian Americans and sports race and the built environment social change and political participation and many more themes. Exploring people, practice, politics, and places, this cutting-edge volume brings together the best themes current in Asian American Studies today, and is a vital reference for all researchers in the field.

Citizens of Asian America: Democracy and Race during the Cold War

Cindy I-Fen Cheng. Citizens of Asian America: Democracy and Race During the Cold War. NYU Press, 2014.

During the Cold War, Soviet propaganda highlighted U.S. racism in order to undermine the credibility of U.S. democracy. In response, incorporating racial and ethnic minorities in order to affirm that America worked to ensure the rights of all and was superior to communist countries became a national imperative. In Citizens of Asian America , Cindy I-Fen Cheng explores how Asian Americans figured in this effort to shape the credibility of American democracy, even while the perceived “foreignness” of Asian Americans cast them as likely alien subversives whose activities needed monitoring following the communist revolution in China and the outbreak of the Korean War. While histories of international politics and U.S. race relations during the Cold War have largely overlooked the significance of Asian Americans, Cheng challenges the black-white focus of the existing historiography. She highlights how Asian Americans made use of the government’s desire to be leader of the “free world” by advocating for civil rights reforms, such as housing integration, increased professional opportunities, and freedom from political persecution. Further, Cheng examines the liberalization of immigration policies, which worked not only to increase the civil rights of Asian Americans but also to improve the nation’s ties with Asian countries, providing an opportunity for the U.S. government to broadcast, on a global scale, the freedom and opportunity that American society could offer.

Selected Publications

• “Words Matter, So Does the Context of History: On the Homeless and the Unhoused” in Modern American History 8:1 (2025): 94-107. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-american-history/article/words-matter-so-does-the-context-of-history-on-the-homeless-and-the-unhoused/7DE970E084C2FE460229D77474F3EBBF
• “Identities and Places: On Writing the History of Filipinotown, Los Angeles” Journal of Asian American Studies 12:1 (2009): 1-33.
• “Out of Chinatowns and into the Suburbs: Chinese Americans and the Politics of Cultural Citizenship in Early Cold War America” American Quarterly 58:3 (December 2006): 1067-1090.

Advisor To

• Verenize Arceo
• Brand Nakashima
• Madison Allen

Selected Awards

• Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, H.I. Romnes Faculty Fellowship, 2018
• University of Wisconsin–Madison Distinguished Teaching Award – Chancellor’s Inclusive Excellence Award, 2017
• The Ronald E. McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program Award for Service as Outstanding Mentor, 2014
• Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition of Outstanding and Invaluable Service to Community for Ronald McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program, 2013-2014

History Courses

• History/Asian American Studies 160: Asian American History: Processes of Movement and Dislocation – Syllabus 2025 (pdf)
• History/Asian American Studies 161: Asian American History: Settlement and National Belonging – Syllabus 2026 (pdf)
• History 600: War and Forced Displacement – Syllabus 2026 (pdf)
• History 600: U.S. Cold War Culture