Lisa Lowe

Lisa Lowe's picture
Samuel Knight Professor of American Studies and Professor of Ethnicity, Race, & Migration; Director Postdoctoral Opportunities

Lisa Lowe received her B.A. in History from Stanford University, and her Ph.D. in Literature from University of California, Santa Cruz. An interdisciplinary scholar whose work is concerned with the analysis of race, immigration, capitalism, and colonialism, she is the author of Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Cornell University Press, 1991), Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Duke University Press, 1996), and The Intimacies of Four Continents (Duke University Press, 2015), and the co-editor of The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Duke University Press, 1997) and New Questions, New Formations: Asian American Studies, a special issue of positions: east asia cultures critique 5:2 (Fall 1997). Before joining Yale, Lowe taught at the University of California, San Diego and Tufts University. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Mellon Foundations, the School of Advanced Study at the University of London, the UC Humanities Research Institute, and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Her recent publications include: “Reckoning Nation and Empire,” in Blackwell Companion to American Studies, J. C. Rowe, ed. (Blackwell, 2010); “New Worlds ‘Discover’ Asia,” American Quarterly, Vol. 68, Issue 2 (June 2016): 413-427; “History Hesitant,” Social Text 125, Vol. 33, No. 4 (December 2015): 85-107; “Transpacific Entanglements,” with Yen Le Espiritu and Lisa Yoneyama, in Flashpoints for Asian American Studies, C. Schlund-Vials, ed. (Fordham University Press, 2017); “Comparative Global Humanities After Man: Alternatives to the Coloniality of Knowledge,” with Kris Manjapra, in Theory, Culture & Society 36: 5 (September 2019); “Globalization,” in Keywords for American Cultural Studies, 3rd ed., B. Burgett and G. Hendler, eds. (NYU Press, 2019); and “Revolutionary Feminisms in a Time of Monsters,” in Revolutionary Feminisms, B. Bhandar and R. Ziadah, eds. (Verso, 2020); “Intimacies as Method,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 34: 2 (2021); “The Dialectics of Abolition,” American Quarterly 75:2 (June 2023): 371-376.

Lowe’s teaching interests include the study of race and liberalism, immigration and U.S. empire, colonial domesticity and social reproduction, and cultures of globalization.