Petrus Liu

Biography

"Petrus Liu is Associate Professor of Chinese & Comparative Literature and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. He received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (Chinese, German, and Latin) from UC Berkeley and taught at Cornell University and Yale-NUS College. Professor Petrus Liu’s teaching and research interests focus on modern Chinese and comparative literature, transnational queer theory, digital media, and the aesthetic of Cold War cultures. His first book, Stateless Subjects: Chinese Martial Arts Literature and Postcolonial History (Cornell 2011), is the first comprehensive study of wuxia film and fiction in the English language. His second book, Queer Marxism in Two Chinas (Duke 2015), assembles a queer Marxist archive of literary materials, cultural criticism, and activist strategies to develop a nonliberal alternative to Western models of queer emancipation. This book won the Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize Honorable Mention and was a finalist for the 2016 Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Studies. Professor Liu is also the coeditor (with Lisa Rofel) of Beyond the Strai(gh)ts: Transnationalism and Queer Chinese Politics, a special issue of Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique that received the Modern Language Association’s Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ) Award for Best Journal Special Issue of 2010. His original articles and critical translations of Chinese theory have appeared in Interventions, Social Text, Modern Language Quarterly, GLQ, Positions, Asian Exchange, CLEAR, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, and Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. His current book project, Cold War Aesthetics in East Asia, offers a new cultural history of postwar world order through a comparative study of Chinese and Korean independence/reunification debates, industries of popular culture, and historical responses to Japanese imperialism. He is also working on several articles that reconsider the tensions between queer theory and Marxism through a transnational framework. Prof. Liu has been a recipient of a J. Y. Pillay Fellowship in Global Asia, and Institute for Cultural Inquiry Berlin Visiting Fellowship, a Telluride Faculty Scholarship, and a Cornell Society for the Humanities Fellowship."

Research Interest

Modern Chinese and comparative literature, transnational queer theory, digital media, and the aesthetic of Cold War cultures