Lisa Lowe

Lisa Lowe is a professor of comparative literature at the University of California-San Diego and a noted scholar in the fields of comparative literature, American studies, Asian American studies and the cultural politics of colonialism and migration. She is currently Visiting Professor of American Studies at Yale University.

Lowe is the author of "Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms" (Cornell University Press, 1991) and "Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics" (Duke University Press, 1996), in which she examines the historical, political, cultural and aesthetic meanings of immigration in relation to Asian Americans. She is coeditor of "The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital" (Duke, 1997), a collection of essays on international cultural studies, and has published numerous articles and essays. A third book, "Metaphors of Globalization", is forthcoming

Her current project, The Intimacies of Four Continents, is a study of the convergence of colonialisms in the early Americas as the conditions for modern humanism and humanistic knowledge. In her presentation, she will share a part of that project that examines the 'forgetting' of Asian indentured labor, native-descendant peoples, and African slavery within modern European liberal discourses of freedom, and its 'return' in gendered racial taxonomies that persist within the humanities today.

Lisa Lowe studied European intellectual history at Stanford University and French literature and critical theory at UC Santa Cruz.