Lisa Lowe


Lisa Lowe is Samuel Knight Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale University. Prior to Yale, she taught at the University of California, San Diego, and most recently at Tufts University. She began as a scholar of French and comparative literature, and her work has since focused on the cultural politics of colonialism, immigration, and globalization. She is known especially for work on French, British, and United States colonialisms, Asian migration and Asian American studies, race and liberalism, and comparative empires.

Academic biography

Lowe studied European intellectual history at Stanford University, and French literature and critical theory at University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Mellon Foundations, the UC Humanities Research Institute, and the American Council of Learned Societies. In 2011–12, she was a University of California President's Faculty Research Fellow, and the Visiting Fellow at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. In the Fall 2012, she was the F. Ross Johnson-Connaught Distinguished Visitor at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. In 2016-2017, she led a Mellon Sawyer Seminar at Tufts, "Comparative Global Humanities." In 2018, the American Studies Association awarded her the Carl Bode - Norman Holmes Pearson Award for lifetime contributions to the field, and the Richard A. Yarborough Prize for outstanding mentoring of underrepresented scholars.

Work

She has authored books on orientalism, immigration, colonialism, and globalization. Her first book Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms, examined culture, class, and sexuality in French and Anglo-American literature, letters, and theory from Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Montesquieu to Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes.
Her second book, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics, analyzed the contradictions of Asian immigration to the United States, observing that Asian immigrants have been included in the workplaces and markets of the U.S., yet through exclusion laws and bars from citizenship, are distanced from national culture and constructed as perpetual immigrants or "foreigners-within." In it, Lowe argues that Asian immigration to the United States is crucial for understanding the racialized nature of U.S. citizenship, racial capitalism, and the rise of U.S. overseas empire. It received the 1997 Book Award in Cultural Studies from the Association for Asian American Studies, and has been frequently cited as a central text in Asian American studies.
Her third monograph, The Intimacies of Four Continents, is a study of settler colonialism, transatlantic African slavery, and the East Indies and China trades in goods and people as the conditions for modern European liberalism and empire. This work inspired at the 2015 annual meeting of the American Studies Association, where an interdisciplinary panel of scholars discussed the influence of the book on their approaches to the humanities. In 2016, it was named Finalist for the John Hope Franklin Award from the American Studies Association, and in 2018, it received the Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association.
Lowe is co-editor, with David Lloyd, of the volume The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, and with Elaine H. Kim, "New Formations, New Questions: Asian American Studies" a special issue of positions: east asia cultures critique. Since 2001, Lowe has co-edited with Jack Halberstam, "Perverse Modernities," a book series for Duke University Press.

Personal life

She is the daughter of social theorist and historian Donald M. Lowe, and sister of Lydia Lowe, of Boston's Chinese Progressive Association.

Selected publications

Books