Lu Liu

I am a PhD candidate in the department of Asian Languages and Cultures at UW-Madison. My dissertation, “Away/With the Pest: Biosocial Abjection and Subject Formation in China, 1930s-1980s.” explores how the constant pest-making in modern Chinese history enacts the pursuit of biosocial purity through scientific, visual, and ideological storytelling. Theoretically, my research investigates and interrogates larger questions of subject formation and the multifold transborder encounters that biopower conjures up and/or erases. I am also interested in the reconfiguration of everyday lived space in the 1950s People’s Republic of China, and the home-(re)making project of the Third Front Campaign (sanxian jianshe) from the 1960s to the 1980s. At UW-Madison, I worked as TA for a variety of courses including Chinese (with Professor Hongming Zhang, first to second semesters; with Professor Weihua Zhu, third semester), Introduction to East Asian Civilization (with Professor Steve Ridgely), and Introduction to Buddhism (with Professor Anthony Cerulli). I also lectured “Survey of Modern Chinese Literature” in spring 2016 and “(En)gendering Modern China: Women, Literature, Cinema” in summer 2017. In 2017-18, I co-organized the Borghesi-Mellon workshop “Space-Relations” funded by UW-Madison Center for the Humanities. In 2018-19, I am Dana-Allen dissertation fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities and working with faculty and graduates students across disciplines.