Lu Liu

Liu Lu is a scholar of modern Chinese literature, media, and visual culture. Her research broadly examines the interplay of subject formation, visual practices, and science and technology. Revised from her dissertation “Away/With the Pest: Science, Visuality, and Socialist Subjectivities in Modern China’s Biosocial Abjection” (University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2019), her current book project investigates how the interactions of literary, scientific, and ideological storytelling reinvented the “pest” from the 1930s to the post-socialist China and reconfigured the human-pest relationship through "biosocial abjection." In this monograph, Liu Lu proposes "pest as method" to rethink modern China's entangled discourses of science, hygiene, and nation-building.

Her 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.

Liu Lu taught courses on Chinese language, literature, gender studies, popular culture, and religious studies at UW-Madison. At Georgia Tech, in addition to Chinese language, she is also prepared to open new courses on food culture, Chinese and East Asian popular culture, the interface of science and culture in modern China, and environmental justice in Asia.