Sianne Ngai, Professor

Primary Office: 460-417
Office Hours: Monday 1:00-3:00 & by appt.
Office Phone: 723-4622

At Stanford Since: 2000

Email: xngai@stanford.edu

Current Year's Courses:

Passions, Emotions, Moods

Critical Methods: Readings in Feminist and Queer Criticism

Senior Seminar: The Paranoid Imagination

Publishing Workshop: The Article

Degrees:

B.A., Brown, 1993

Ph.D., Harvard, 2000

Image of Sianne Ngai, Professor

Sianne Ngai specializes in American literature, literary and cultural theory, and feminist studies. Her books are Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Harvard University Press, 2012), winner of a 2013 Ray and Pat Browne award from the PCA/ACA, and Ugly Feelings (Harvard University Press, 2005).  Sections of both books have been translated into Swedish, Italian, German, and Slovenian.  

She is working on a new project on literary gimmicks and the intersection of technique and enchantment in the literature of twentieth-century capitalism, tentatively called (after a line from the poet George Oppen) The Sad Marvels.  

Ngai was a recipient of a 2007-08 Charles A. Ryskamp Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies and in 2014-15 will be a Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Berlin, Germany.  Currently a Contributing Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books, she will join the faculty at the Cornell School for Criticism and Theory in the summer of 2014.