Biographical Information

David Palumbo-Liu is Professor of Comparative Literature, and, by courtesy, English, 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. His current project addresses the role of contemporary humanistic literature with regard to the instruments and discourses of globalization, seeking to discover modes of affiliation and transnational ethical thinking; he is also editing two collections of essays--one on Rational Choice Theory and the Humanities and one on world-systems analysis and disciplinary practices. 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

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; New Centennial Review; Cultural Critique; Public Culture, boundary 2,and others. Copies of recent essays and a full biography and bibliography are available via the "Resources" tab on this website.

David Palumbo-Liu received both his undergraduate and graduate training at the University of California, Berkeley, obtaining undergraduate degrees in Comparative Literature (English and French) and what was then called "Oriental Languages" (major field, Chinese). His graduate work focused on Chinese literature and on literary criticism and theory. He received his PhD in Comparative Literature from Berkeley in 1988.

He spent two years in East Asia--one year of Chinese language study in Taiwan, and one year in Kyoto, Japan, as a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council. There he researched Japanese scholarship on classical Chinese literature at Kyoto University and at the Research Institute for Humanistic Studies; he was appointed as a fellow at both institutions.

While pursuing a PhD in comparative literature at Berkeley, he began working in Asian American studies as well, teaching courses on Asian American history and literature in that department. Upon completion of the PhD, he accepted a joint appointment as assistant professor in Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service and Department of English, where he taught courses on Chinese literature and American ethnic literature, literary criticism and theory, and comparative literature.

In 1990, he joined the Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford. Part of his duties was to help establish Asian American Studies. He was a founding faculty member of Stanford's Program in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CSRE), which was established in 1997, along with a research center (Research Institute for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity). From 1999 to 2005 he served as director of the Program in Modern Thought and Literature. During that period he helped initiate and organize major conferences on Rational Choice Theory and the Humanities and World-Systems Analysis, among other events. Invited speakers included Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jon Elster, Kenneth Arrow, Regenia Gagnier, John Dupre, Immanuel Wallerstein, Bruce Robbins, Linda Hutcheon, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Anna Tsing, Michael Watts, Michael Hardt, and many others.

In 1994 he declined a visiting appointment at Harvard in order to accept a year's fellowship leave at the Stanford Humanities Center. It was there that he began to work in earnest on his second book on Asian American cultural studies. In 1998 he spent the fall term teaching courses on immigration, decolonization, and exoticism at the Stanford Program in Paris.

Current Projects

Palumbo-Liu's current research includes studies of border art; notions of affinity in literature; race, media and visuality; culture and public policy, the aesthetics and ethics of globalization.