Sealing Cheng is the Henry Luce Assistant Professor in the Women’s Studies Department. She joined Wellesley in spring 2005. Her courses include: Introduction to Women’s Studies; Global Feminism; Love and Intimacy; and Asian Women on the Move.
Cheng is an anthropologist and researches on issues of sexuality, prostitution, migration, trafficking, and human rights, with a focus on South Korea. She received her doctorate in anthropology at Oxford University. She was a Korean Foundation Fieldwork Research Fellow in 2008, conducting her latest research on the globalization of anti-trafficking policies in South Korea. Incorporating activism and arts into her academic work, she organized a photo exhibition of works taken by women in a red-light district with the Courageous Women Research Center, South Korea. The exhibition, "Our Lives, Our Space" will travel to Wellesley, New York University and University of Pittsburg in 2009-10.
Before coming to Wellesley, Cheng taught at the University of Hong Kong as a Visiting Assistant Professor from 2002–2003. She was a Rockefeller Postdoctoral Fellow in the Program for the Study of Sexuality, Gender, Health, and Human Rights at Columbia University from 2003–2004. Since 2003, she has taught at the Summer Institute on Sexuality, Culture, and Society at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands; as well as the Sexuality, Gender, and Rights Institute: Exploring Theory and Practice, in Istanbul.
Her journal articles have appeared in Feminist Review, Health and Human Rights, International Feminist Journal of Politics, East Asia, and Asia-Pacific Viewpoint. She has also written a book, which will be published in 2010: On the Move for Love: Migrant Entertainers and the U.S. Military in South Korea, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.