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I am a scholar of modern Chinese literature, media, and visual cultures. I am completing my Ph.D. dissertation, “Away/With the Pest: Hygienic Visuality and Narrations of Interspecies Encounters in Modern China” at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Starting August 2019, I will join the School of Modern Languages at Georgie Institute of Technology as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Chinese, where I will be teaching Chinese language, literature, and culture and exploring diverse content courses on visual culture in the Sinosphere, the interface of science and culture in modern China, East Asian popular culture and media studies, and environmental justice in Asia.

Questions about the interplay of subject formation, visual practices, and science and technology drive my research. I broadly explore how human subjectivities in modern China evolve through engagements with the nonhuman other, including animals and machines. My dissertation studies how the interactions of literary, scientific, and ideological storytelling reinvented the “pest” from the 1930s to the post-socialist China, and, in this process, reconfigured the human-pest relationship that I characterize as interspecies intimacy.

My two future research projects cover the fields of media studies, oral history, and memory studies. One book-length project performs a media archaeology of techno-medical visions produced by cine-microscopy, the X-ray, anatomy images, and forensic photography in modern China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. The other is an oral history project on families relocated to Guizhou Province during the Third Front Campaign (三线建设), a massive migration of human and technological resources from the 1960s to the 1980s in the PRC.

While at UW-Madison, I taught courses on Chinese language, literature, gender studies, popular culture, and religious studies. In Summer 2019, I will be teaching an advanced seminar, “Visual Cultures in Socialist China,” that explores the dynamics between cultural productions, socialist constructions, and subject formations in the Mao era.

Lu Liu in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures :

Lu Liu in the Institute of Research in the Humanities