Lisa Lowe

Lisa Lowe
Academic background
Education	Stanford University (BA) University of California, Santa Cruz (PhD)
Academic work
Discipline	Comparative literature
Institutions	University of California, San Diego Tufts University Yale University
Notable works	Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms; Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics; The Intimacies of Four Continents
Website	https://americanstudies.yale.edu/people/lisa-lowe

Lisa Lowe is an American scholar of literature and cultural history. She is the Samuel Knight Professor of American Studies at Yale University, and affiliate faculty member of programs in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Prior to Yale, she taught at the University of California, San Diego and Tufts University. As an interdisciplinary scholar, Lowe began her work in French and comparative literature. Since then, her work has focused on the cultural politics of colonialism, immigration, and globalization. She is known for her scholarship on French, British, and American colonialism, Asian migration and Asian American studies, race and liberalism, and comparative empires.

Career

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 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. In 2022-2024, she was an Affiliate Scholar at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2026.

Work

She has authored books on orientalism, immigration, colonialism, and globalization. Her first book Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (1991), 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 (1996), 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 (2015), 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 a round table discussion 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, The Intimacies of Four Continents 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 (1997), and with Elaine H. Kim, "New Formations, New Questions: Asian American Studies" (1997) a special issue of Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique. Since 2001, Lowe has been co-editing, Perverse Modernities, a book series with Jack Halberstam published by Duke University Press.

Personal life

She is the daughter of historian Donald M. Lowe, and the sister of activist Lydia Lowe who is the Executive Director of the Chinatown Community Land Trust and has led the Chinese Progressive Association in Boston for over 30 years.

Selected publications

References