Lydia H. Liu

The Wun Tsun Tam Professor in the Humanities, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures; Director, the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.

Modern Chinese literature and culture; critical translation theory; postcolonial theory; new empire studies; material culture, semiotics, and new media

Professor Liu's research has focused on cross-cultural exchange in global history; the movement of words, theories, and artifacts across national boundaries; and the evolution of writing, textuality, and technology.

Her recent collaboration with Rebecca Karl and Dorothy Ko, The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Feminism, appeared in print in the Weatherhead Books on Asia series, published by Columbia University Press in 2013.

As a creative writer, she published The Nesbit Code (in Chinese) with Oxford University Press in Hong Kong in 2013. This book received the 2014 Hong Kong Book Award.

Professor Liu is the author of The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious (University of Chicago Press). Her recent publications include a new article in German translation called "Abgründe des Universalismus: P. C. Chang entgrenzt die Menschenrechte" published in the Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte IX/1 Frühjahr 2015; another article titled "The Eventfulness of Translation: Temporality, Difference, and Competing Universals" published in translation: a transdisciplinary journal (in Italy), a special issue edited by Naoki Sakai and Sandro Mezzadra, no.4 (Spring 2014); "Shadows of Universalism: The Untold Story of Human Rights Around 1948," Critical Inquiry, Summer 2014; "Henry Wheaton" in Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law edited by Bardo Fassbender and Anne Peters with Simone Peter and Daniel Högger (Oxford, 2012) and "Translingual Folklore and Folklorics in China" in A Companion to Folklore, edited by Regina F. Bendix and Galit Hasan-Rokem (Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2012). Her other books include The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (2004); Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations (editor, 1999); Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity (1995); and Writing and Materiality in China (co-edited with Judith Zeitlin, 2003).

Professor Liu was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1997-1998) and a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin (2004-2005); in 2013, she was the Class of 1932 Fellow in the Humanities Council at Princeton University.

Among her many activities, Professor Liu is the founding Director of Tsinghua-Columbia Center for Translingual and Transcultural Studies (CTTS)at Tsinghua University in Beijing to promote international collaboration and interdisciplinary research.

Professor Liu received her PhD from Harvard (1990). Before joining Columbia in 2006, she was the Helmut F. Stern Professor in Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan (2002-2006) and the Catherine and William L. Magistretti Distinguished Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California-Berkeley.

Email: [email protected]