Rate My Professor John Cheng

Professor John Cheng is an Associate Professor in the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies at Binghamton University, State University of New York at Binghamton, and a faculty member in the History Department. He earned his PhD and MA from the University of California and his AB from Harvard College. A historian of modern America and the history of science and technology, Cheng's research specializations include comparative transnational and intersectional studies of race, gender, and nation; popular culture, media, and technology; the history of earth, life, and human sciences and of computing; historiography and critical theory.

Cheng authored the book Astounding Wonder: Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), which explores the emergence of science fiction as a popular cultural genre and its relationship to popular science, and was selected by Locus Magazine for its 2012 Recommended Reading list. He contributed to the documentary series Race: The Power of an Illusion (California Newsreel, 2003). His current projects are Unnatural Citizens, examining racial denaturalization and expatriation and their consequences for Asian Americans and the racial character of twentieth-century American citizenship, and Barred Zones, considering the geographic implications of racial modernity, including inter-relationships between technology, territory, law, and race for the United States and other emergent nation-states in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century age of empire. Key publications also include "Asians and Asian Americans in Early Science Fiction" (Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, 2019) and "Immigration, Precarity, and Human Trafficking: Histories and Legacies of Asian American Racial Exclusion in the United States" (2021). Before joining Binghamton University, he engaged with Asian American community organizations in Washington, DC, and Chicago. Cheng teaches Asian American history, race and popular culture, comparative transnational racial formation, historical methods and documentary history, and digital culture and literacy.