| Sealing Cheng | ||
scheng2@wellesley.edu Telephone: 781.283.2527 Office Hours: Tuesdays and Fridays, 11:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. Courses Taught: 120 Introduction to Women's Studies 205 Love and Intimacy: A Cross-cultural Perspective 206 Asian Women on the Move: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and Gender 312 Capstone Seminar: Feminist Inquiry Biography It was a great pleasure to join the Women's Studies Department last Spring (2005). I am an anthropologist and my current research is on issues of sexuality, prostitution, migration, trafficking, and human rights. I have conducted research in South Korea, the Philippines, Hong Kong and Shanghai. In a previous life, I studied food culture in Hong Kong, and published several book chapters on the subject. I received my undergraduate and masters degrees at the University of Hong Kong, and my doctorate at Oxford University. Before coming to Wellesley, I taught at the University of Hong Kong as a Visiting Assistant Professor in 2002-2003. I first arrived in the US in 2003 to take up a Rockefeller Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Program for the Study of Sexuality, Gender, Health, and Human Rights at Columbia University. In the summers of 2004 and 2005, I taught at the Summer Institute on Sexuality, Culture, and Society at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. My works have appeared in the following journals: Health and Human Rights, International Feminist Journal of Politics, East Asia, and Asia-Pacific Viewpoint. Some of my works have appeared in Chinese, or translated into Korean. I am currently working on my manuscript "Transnational Desires: Filipina Entertainers in US Military Camp Towns in South Korea." I enjoy teaching because I see it as a process of co-production of knowledge. Students play an important role in giving momentum and substance to a class with their comments, interpretations of the readings, and questions. Interactions with students are important stimuli to me in conveying the complexities of an issue, and exploring the ways to grapple with them. Probably due to my anthropological training, I like to start the process of learning from the margins - in order to critically engage with the underlying assumptions and politics of the normative. For the students, I guess it means that it's very difficult to just sit back, listen, and write notes in my classes! When I am not teaching or writing, my work involves doing fieldwork that involves one or more of the following: roaming around US military camp towns and red-light districts in Korea, talking and hanging out with Filipinas and Korean women who work in the areas, meeting and chatting with American and Korean male clients, trying hard to remain sober and remember conversations that took place over rounds of beer and hard liquor; working with local and international nongovernmental organizations on issues of prostitution and trafficking; following the Filipina entertainers she met in Korea back to the Philippines and then their subsequent diasporic sites. Theatre has always been a passion of mine, even though academic work and traveling takes me away from it. In 2002, I combined my research interest, feminist commitment, and passion in the theatre in researching, writing and performing Stories of Our Little Sisters. It was inspired by The Vagina Monologues, but it was also rooted in the experiences of Hong Kong women. The reflections on transnational feminism I gained from this production are published as a commentary in the International Feminist Journal of Politics (2003), Vol 6(2). Publications
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| Department of Women's Studies, Wellesley
College 422 Founders Hall 21 Wellesley College Road Wellesley, MA 02481 Created: January 27, 2006 Last Updated: February 6, 2006 |
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Betty Tiro Contact us by email Telephone: 781.283.2538 Fax: 781.283.3630 About these photographs Copyright |