Sianne Ngai

Sianne Ngai is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English at University of Chicago. A cultural theorist, literary critic, and feminist scholar, her work is most broadly concerned with the analysis of aesthetic forms and judgments specific to capitalism. Her publications include: Ugly Feelings, which investigates the aesthetics and politics of non-prestigious, non-cathartic negative emotions; Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, which won the Modern Language Association’s James Russell Lowell Prize; and Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form, winner of the Association of the Study of the Arts of the Present 2021 Book Prize.

Ngai’s work has been translated into multiple languages, and she has received fellowships from the Institute of Advanced Study in Berlin and the American Council of Learned Societies. She co-edited a special issue of Critical Inquiry on Comedy. Ngai was previously Professor of English at Stanford University and has also taught at the Cornell School for Criticism and Theory and The Southern California Institute for Architecture. She earned her B.A. and M.F.A. from Brown University and her PhD. from Harvard University.