Sianne Ngai

Ngai’s first book, Ugly Feelings (2005, Harvard University Press), is considered a key work of affect theory for its focus on politically ambiguous, non-cathartic negative emotions—envy and irritation as opposed to anger and fear. Her second book, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (2012, Harvard University Press), which won the Modern Language Association’s James Russell Lowell Prize, argues for the contemporary centrality of three everyday aesthetic categories, which are approached with the same philosophical seriousness given to the beautiful and sublime. Ngai’s most recent book, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (2020, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), a Christian Gauss Award finalist, co-winner of the ASAP Book Prize, and a Literary Hub Book of the Year, explores the “gimmick” as a speech act and form encoding a series of interconnected contradictions concerning labor, time, and value. Extending Ngai’s previous investigation of the rise of equivocal aesthetic judgments (such as the merely “interesting”), Theory of the Gimmick explores the uneasy mix of attraction and repulsion produced by the gimmick across a range of forms specific to capitalist culture. Ngai’s work is most broadly concerned with the analysis of aesthetic forms and judgments specific to capitalism. She is currently working on Ugly Thinking, a book about the affective dimensions of dialectical thought and the ways in which Marx, Hegel, and a number of writers and artists inhabit error.

Ngai has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, The American Academy in Berlin (Berlin Prize), Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advanced Study), the American Council of Learned Societies, The Huntington Library, and the Stanford Humanities Center. She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate (D. Phil, 2015) in Humanities from the University of Copenhagen. She co-edited, with Lauren Berlant, a special issue of Critical Inquiry on Comedy (2017). Ngai has also taught at the Cornell School for Criticism and Theory and Sci-Arch, The Southern California Institute for Architecture. Her work has been translated into multiple languages, including French, Polish, Swedish, Italian, German, Slovenian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Japanese. 

Ngai has presented work at the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Ästehtik Kongress in Offenbach, Germany, the Aesthetics Seminar at Aarhus University in Denmark, the FORART Lecture Series in Oslo, Norway, and the ELLAK International Conference at Hanyang University in Seoul, South Korea. Recent talks also include the Avenali Chair in the Humanities Lecture at University of California, Berkeley; the Srinivas Aravamudan Lecture in Critical Theory at Duke University; the Ian Watt Lecture at Stanford University; and a Humanities Without Boundaries Lecture at University of Wisconsin, Madison.

• “Ambiguous Lever.” PMLA 137.3 (2022): 529-535. (“Theories and Methodologies: Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious— Forty Years On”).
• Das Niedliche und der Gimmick: Zwei ästhetische Kategorien, trans. Christina Dongowski (Leipzig: Merve Verlag, 2022).
• The Cute (Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art), ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2022).
• Vores æstetiske kategorier. Det gakkede, det nuttede og det interessante. Informations Forlag, 2021. Translated by Peter Borum with an afterword by Mikkel Bogh (National Gallery of Denmark). 
• Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, and Interesting (Harvard University Press, 2012; paperback edition 2015) 
• Ugly Feelings (Harvard University Press, 2005; paperback edition, 2007
•  “Theory of the Gimmick.” Critical Inquiry 43 (Winter 2017): 466-505
• “Comedy Has Issues,” with Lauren Berlant. Introduction to Comedy: An Issue, a special issue of Critical Inquiry 43 (Winter 2017): 233-249.
• The Philosopher’s Zone, Radio interview with Sianne Ngai by Joe Gelonesi. Broadcast November 1, 2015 on Australia Broadcasting Radio National.
• “Visceral Abstractions.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21. 1 (January 2015): 33-63.
• “Merely Interesting.” Critical Inquiry 34 (Summer 2008): 777-817.
• “The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde.” Critical Inquiry 31.4 (Summer 2005): 811-847.
• “‘A Foul Lump Started Making Promises in My Voice’: Race, Affect, and the Animated Subject.” American Literature 74.3 (September 2002): 571-601.
• “Critique’s Persistence: An Interview with Sianne Ngai” in Politics / Letters (online), February 27, 2017.

Ngai teaches courses in American literature, feminist and queer literary criticism, narrative poetics, and aesthetic theory. Recent courses at the University of Chicago include ENGL 20650: Junior Seminar: Passions, Emotions, Moods; ENGL 65550L: Henry James; and HUMA16100: Media Aesthetics (Text).