David Palumbo-Liu is professor of comparative literature at Stanford University. His fields of interest include social and cultural criticism, literary theory and criticism, East Asian and Asia Pacific American studies. He has published widely in each of these areas, including four books and numerous articles that have been translated into Chinese, German, French and Portuguese. Palumbo-Liu was recruited to Stanford in part to help establish Asian American Studies, and he was one of the founding faculty members of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.

He has been a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, Kyoto University, and the Research Institute for Humanistic Study (Jimbun kagaku kenskyosho) in Japan. He trained in East Asian area studies and classical Chinese literature, and comparative literature. His publications include The Poetics of Appropriation: the literary theory and practice of Huang Tingjian (1045-1105); The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, Interventions; Streams of Cultural Capital: Transnational Cultural Studies; and Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier, as well as numerous book chapters and articles in journals such as Poetics Today; diacritics; differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies; New Literary History; Cultural Critique; Public Culture, and others. Copies of recent essays and a full biography and bibliography are available at his website.

“Asian American studies for me is both the combining of and questioning of the identities of 'Asian,' 'American,' and 'Asian American.' I am specifically interested in ways literature and history helps us understand the ways these terms have been invented, modified, and embedded in global histories.” -- David Palumbo-Liu

His current project addresses the role of contemporary humanistic literature with regard to economistic models of human behavior. Palumbo-Liu is most interested in issues regarding social theory, community, justice, globalization, and the specific role that literature and the humanities play in helping us address each of these areas.


Related Links
www.stanford.edu/~palboliu


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