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 was Visiting Professor of American Studies at Yale University in 2007-2008.[1] In 2011-2012, she is a University of California President's Faculty Research Fellow and Visiting Fellow at the School of Advanced Study, University of London.[2][3]
Lowe has authored books on orientalism, immigration and globalization. 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 this work, she examines the 'forgetting' of the conjunction 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.[1] She coedits with Judith Halberstam, "Perverse Modernities," a book series with Duke University Press.[4]
Lowe studied European intellectual history at Stanford University, and French literature and critical theory at UC Santa Cruz.[1]
Lowe, Lisa (1991) Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms. Cornell University Press
Lowe, Lisa (1996) Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Duke University Press[5]
Lowe, Lisa and David Lloyd, eds. (1997) The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital. Duke University Press[6]
Lowe, Lisa (2006) "The Intimacy of Four Continents." In Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History. Ann Laura Stoler, ed. Duke University Press
Lowe, Lisa (2007) "Globalization." In Keywords for American Cultural Studies. Bruce Burgett and Glen Hendler, eds. New York University Press
Lowe, Lisa (2010) "Metaphors of Globalization." In Interdisciplinarity and Social Justice. Ranu Samantrai, Joe Parker, and Mary Romero, eds. State University of New York