Document
Joyce Cheng
Election
Position
Name
Joyce Cheng
Candidate statement
Associate Professor, Department of History of Art & Architecture, University of Oregon
I am associate professor of art history at the University of Oregon where I teach courses in modern art, art theory and criticism, and visual culture. I am the author of The Persistence of Masks: Surrealism and the Ethnography of the Subject (University of Minnesota Press, 2025), which considers the figure of the mask in surrealist visual arts and poetics in terms of a covert theory of the subject as non-hegemonic, non-anthropocentric, and feminine-identified. My essays on symbolism, dada, surrealism and primitivism have appeared in journals such as Modernism/modernity, Res, Gradhiva, and Comparative Literature. Informed indirectly by the ethnographic dimension of surrealism, my current project is a study of the Japanese cultural icon Hello Kitty as an object for anthropological aesthetics, and an example of a heuristic framework I call critical folklore.
With art history as my primary discipline, I became a regular attendee of the Modernism Studies Association conferences fairly late in my career. As a Taiwanese-American scholar of modernism and the avant-garde who works primarily on francophone materials, I am interested in contributing to the MSA’s ongoing reach beyond Anglophone literary studies. I would love to help recruit colleagues in art history, theatre studies, and musicology, and in non-Anglophone areas (especially East Asia and Latin America) as regular MSA members and participants.
I am associate professor of art history at the University of Oregon where I teach courses in modern art, art theory and criticism, and visual culture. I am the author of The Persistence of Masks: Surrealism and the Ethnography of the Subject (University of Minnesota Press, 2025), which considers the figure of the mask in surrealist visual arts and poetics in terms of a covert theory of the subject as non-hegemonic, non-anthropocentric, and feminine-identified. My essays on symbolism, dada, surrealism and primitivism have appeared in journals such as Modernism/modernity, Res, Gradhiva, and Comparative Literature. Informed indirectly by the ethnographic dimension of surrealism, my current project is a study of the Japanese cultural icon Hello Kitty as an object for anthropological aesthetics, and an example of a heuristic framework I call critical folklore.
With art history as my primary discipline, I became a regular attendee of the Modernism Studies Association conferences fairly late in my career. As a Taiwanese-American scholar of modernism and the avant-garde who works primarily on francophone materials, I am interested in contributing to the MSA’s ongoing reach beyond Anglophone literary studies. I would love to help recruit colleagues in art history, theatre studies, and musicology, and in non-Anglophone areas (especially East Asia and Latin America) as regular MSA members and participants.
Candidate CV