Anna Storti

Anna M. Moncada Storti is a writer, professor, and interdisciplinary scholar of feminist theory, queer of color critique, and Asian American Studies. Her work explores the aesthetic and affective relations between race, empire, violence, and pleasure, specializing in art and culture across the Asian diaspora.

Broadly, Storti’s scholarship examines the cultures of imperialism, with a focus on the mid-twentieth to early twenty-first century United States and its presence in Asia and the Pacific. Through methods of literary and visual cultural analysis, aesthetic interpretation, and artist interviews, her major research projects formulate new ways of understanding how the legacies of the United States’ empire-building in the so-called “American” 20th century inform racial and sexual cultures in the “Asian” 21st century. Her research has been supported by the McNair Scholars Program, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Institute for Citizens and Scholars.

Her first book, Torn: Asian/white Life and the Intimacy of Violence, is under contract with Duke University Press. She is also at work on a second book, which spotlights the practice and cultures of vice.

Storti has been published in a variety of venues. Her academic writing can be found in Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Feminist Studies, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, and elsewhere. Public-facing work appears in Reappropriate: Asian American feminism, politics, and pop culture, and her poetry is published with Sinister Wisdom: A Multicultural Lesbian Literary and Art Journal. 

Prior to joining Duke, she was the Guarini Dean's Postdoctoral Fellow in Asian American Studies at Dartmouth College, and she holds a PhD in Women's Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park.