Lydia H. Liu

Lydia H Liu is the Wun Tsun Tam Professor in the Humanities and former Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society (ICLS). She teaches in the Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures and at ICLS. Her scholarship is focused on cross-cultural exchange in global history; the movement of words, theories, and artifacts across national boundaries; the philosophy of language; and the evolution of writing, textuality, and technology.

Professor Liu is the author of many books including The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious (University of Chicago Press, 2010); The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (Harvard University Press, 2004); Translingual Practice (Stanford University Press,1995). She is the editor of The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Feminism with Rebecca Karl and Dorothy Ko, a book published by Columbia University Press in 2013. This book is listed as one of the Essential Reads on Feminism by New York Public Library. She is the editor of Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations (Duke University Press, 1999) and Writing and Materiality in China co-edited with Judith Zeitlin (Harvard University Asia Center, 2003).

Her new edited volume Global Language Justice (with Anupama Rao and Charlotte Silverman) was published by Columbia University Press in 2023, which offers a new conception of justice to address the rapid loss of linguistic diversity in the ongoing ecological crise of the world.

Professor Liu’s books in Chinese include Origins of the Global Order: From Meridian Lines to the Standard of Civilization (edited 2016) and Natural Justice & Equity, the first annotated edition of major anarchist journals of the early 20th century co-edited with Wan Shiguo (2016). As creative writer, she published The Nesbit Code in Chinese with Oxford University Press in Hong Kong (2013) which received the 2014 Hong Kong Book Award. A new edition of the book was issued by Sanlian in Beijing in 2023.

Professor Liu was a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin (2004-2005). In 2018-2019, she was a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.