This event was presented in collaboration with the Center for the Humanities.
Sianne Ngai is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Ugly Feelings (2005) and Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (2012), winner of the MLA James Russell Lowell Prize. Her most recent book is Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (2020), which was shortlisted for the Christian Gauss Book Prize, co-winner of the ASAP Book Prize, and a Literary Hub Book of the Year. Ngai is currently working on a book about the affective dimensions of dialectical thinking.