Lydia Liu

Lydia H. Liu is the Wun Tsun Tam Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. She is the author of The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious (2010). 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) as well as a collaboration with Rebecca Karl and Dorothy Ko called The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Feminism (2013). As a bilingual writer, her experimental detective fiction in Chinese, The Nesbit Code (Oxford University Press, Hong Kong) won the 2014 Hong Kong Book Award. Her recent articles include “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), no.4 (Spring 2014); “Shadows of Universalism: The Untold Story of Human Rights Around 1948,” Critical Inquiry, Summer 2014; “Henry Wheaton” in the Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law edited by Bardo Fassbender and Anne Peters with Simone Peter and Daniel Högger (Oxford, 2012) as well as “Translingual Folklore and Folklorics in China” in A Companion to Folklore, edited by Regina F. Bendix and Galit Hasan-Rokem (Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2012). Among her awards, Lydia H. Liu was a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin.