Skip to main content

Lisa Lowe


Ph.D. (UC Santa Cruz)

Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature

Website: https://americanstudies.yale.edu/people/lisa-lowe

Guggenheim Fellow
American Council of Learned Societies Fellow
Recipient of UCSD Chancellor's Associates Faculty Excellence Award

Recipient of UCSD President's Fellowship in the Humanities

Lisa Lowe studied European intellectual history at Stanford and French literature and critical theory at UC Santa Cruz. She was a member of the Literature Department for more than two decades, and served as department chair 1998-2001; she taught European and American studies, and was an affiliated faculty in the department of Ethnic Studies and the program in Critical Gender Studies. She served on the Editorial Committee of the University of California Press (1995-2000) and the UC President's Humanities Commission (2000-2002), was chair of the Board of Governors of the UC Humanities Research Institute (2002-05), and on the steering committee of the UC Center for New Racial Studies (2010-2012). Her research on nineteenth-century colonialisms, and twentieth-century immigration and globalization, has been supported by fellowships from the School of Advanced Study - University of London, Guggenheim Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Mellon Foundation, UC Humanities Research Institute, and American Council of Learned Societies. She is now Samuel Knight Professor of American Studies at Yale University.

Selected Publications:

Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991

Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996 [1997 Book Award in Cultural Studies, Association for Asian American Studies; 1997 Honorable Mention John Hope Franklin Award, American Studies Association]

The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital. ed. with David Lloyd. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997

New Formations, New Questions: Asian American Studies. ed. with Elaine Kim. special issue of positions: east asia cultures critique 5: 2 (Fall 1997)

"Work, Immigration, Gender: New Subjects of Cultural Politics." Social Justice 25: 3 (Fall 1998). Translated into Japanese. Shiso: Globalization, Culture, and New Formation of Spatial Politics. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten (2002). Republished in American Studies: A Reader, Janice Radway, et al., eds. Malden and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Republished in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, Second Edition, Vincent B. Leitch et al., eds. New York: Norton, 2010

"The International within the National: American Studies and Asian American Critique." Cultural Critique 40 (Fall 1998). Republished in The Futures of American Studies, Donald Pease and Robyn Wiegman, eds. Durham: Duke, 2003. Translated into Italian. In I volti dell'altro. Letterature della diaspora e migranti. Paola Boi and Radhouan Ben Amara, eds. Cagliari, Editions AV, 2003

"Immigrant Literatures: A Modern Structure of Feeling." In Literature on the Move: Comparing Diasporic Ethnicities in Europe and the Americas, Dominique Marçais et al., eds. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 2001

"Insufficient Difference" Ethnicities 4: 3 (2005): 409-414

"The Intimacy of Four Continents," Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History. Ann Laura Stoler, ed. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006

"Globalization," Keywords for American Cultural Studies. Bruce Burgett and Glen Hendler, eds. New York: New York University Press, 2007

"Asian and African Diaspora in Global Modernity." Gendai-Shiso (Revue de la pensée d'aujourd'hui) 6: 35-7 (2007)

"Autobiography Out of Empire." Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 28, Vol 13, No 1 (2009): 98-111

"Metaphors of Globalization," Interdisciplinarity and Social Justice. Ranu Samantrai, Joe Parker, and Mary Romero, eds. Albany: State University of New York, 2010

"Reckoning Nation and Empire," Blackwell Companion to American Studies. John Carlos Rowe, ed. Oxford:  Blackwell, 2010

The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015