core faculty

Lydia H. Liu

Lydia Liu

Wun Tsun Tam Professor in the Humanities

Office: 406 Kent Hall
Office Hours: Wed 4pm-6pm
Phone: (212) 854-5631
Email: ll2410@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: Northwestern Normal University
MA: Shangdong University
PhD: Harvard University

Classes Taught

EAAS UN3927 China in the Modern World
EAAS G8035 Lu Xun and Modern China
CPLS GR6100 Introduction to Comparative Literature and Society
CLEA 6120GR Race and Empire in the Asia Pacific

EAASGR6712 The Chinese Avant-Garde: A Political History

Research Interests

Modern Chinese literature and comparative literature, media studies, philosophy of language, and critical translation theory.

Lydia H. Liu is the Wun Tsun Tam Professor in the Humanities and former Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Her research centers on modern China, cross-cultural exchange, and global transformation in modern history, with a focus on the movement of words, theories, and artifacts across national boundaries and on the evolution of writing, textuality, and media technology.

Professor Liu teaches courses on modern Chinese literature and culture in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and offers graduate courses on comparative literature, critical translation theory, and digital media at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.

She is the author of The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious (University of Chicago Press, 2010); The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (Harvard UP, 2004); and Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, Translated Modernity (Stanford UP, 1995). Her other books include Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations (editor, Duke, 1999); an edited volume in Chinese called The Global Order and the Standard of Civilization (Beijing Sanlian, 2016) which appeared in Korean edition translated by Tae-Geun Cha (Gyoyudang Press) in 2022. Her co-edited volume The Birth of Chinese Feminism with Rebecca Karl and Dorothy Ko (Columbia UP, 2013) is on the New York Public Library’s list of Essential Reads on Feminism.

More recently, Professor Liu has published the following articles/book chapters: “Wittgenstein in the Machine” in Critical Inquiry (Spring 2021); “The Incalculable: Thoughts on the Collapse of the Biosecurity Regime” in Critical Inquiry (Winter 2021); “Das Digitale in der psychischen Maschine “in Technosphäre (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2019); “Die Erfindung des Freud’schen Roboters,” Springerin, no.4 (2019), and “The Gift of a Living Past” in Ashis Nandy: A Life in Dissent (Oxford UP, 2018); “The Battleground of Translation: Making Equal in a Global Structure of Inequality,” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, 38 (2018).

As a creative writer, she published The Nesbit Code in Chinese with Oxford University Press in Hong Kong that won the 2014 Hong Kong Book Award.

Professor Liu was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1997–1998) and a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin (2004–2005); a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2018-2019). In 2021, she was elected to the Executive Committee of the International Council for Philosophy and Human Sciences under the auspices UNESCO.

Selected Publications

The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious (University of Chicago Press, 2010).

The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (Harvard, 2004)

Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations (editor, Duke, 1999)

Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity (Stanford, 1995)

The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Feminism (co-author with Rebecca Karl and Dorothy Ko, Columbia, 2013)

Lening Liu

Lening Liu

Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Coordinator of Classical Chinese

Office: 626 Kent Hall
Office Hours: T/R 1PM-2:30PM
Phone: (212) 854-7036
Email: ll172@columbia.edu

Educational Background

PhD: Linguistics, University of Florida (1996)
MA: History of Chinese Language, Shaanxi Normal University (1985)
BA: Chinese Language and Literature, Shaanxi Normal University (1982)

Classes Taught

CHNS GU4516 Fifth Year Chinese I
CHNS GU4518 Fifth Year Chinese II
CHNS GU4301 Intro to Classical Chinese
CHNS GU4302 Introduction to Classical Chinese II
CHNS GR5001 Chinese Linguistic and Pedagogy

Research Interests

Linguistics
Historical Syntax
Discourse Grammar
Chinese Language Pedagogy

Lening Liu was born and raised in Xi’an, China. In 1977, right after the Cultural Revolution, he entered college as part of an extremely select group of students to finally end years of disruption of higher learning in China. He came to the United States in 1990 and studied linguistics at the University of Florida. He joined Columbia’s faculty in 1995 and received his Ph.D. in 1996. He has published a number of articles on the evolution of Chinese conjunctive adverbs, the rhetorical structures of Chinese, the history and innovation of Chinese pedagogy, etc. Courses he has taught include Introduction to Classical Chinese, Readings in Classical Chinese, History of Chinese Language, Educational Chinese Linguistics, Chinese Language Pedagogy and all levels of Modern Chinese. Currently, Liu is Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures. He also directs the Chinese Language Program and serves as the co-director of the Certificate Program of Teaching Chinese to Speakers of Other Languages.

Publications

Handbook for Chinese Teachers Beijing Language University Press, 2017; co-author)
Proceeding of the First International Conference on Modern Linguistics and Chinese Education (Beijing Language and Culture University Press, 2016; co-author)
Studying in China (Peking University Press, 2014; co-author)
Approaching China (Peking University Press, 2015; co-author)
A Course on Intercultural Communication (Higher Education Press, 2013; co-author)
Experiencing China (Peking University Press, 2013; co-author)
Contemporary Chinese Reader (Peking University Press, 2011; co-author)
International Standards for Teaching Chinese to Speakers of Other Languages (Foreign Language Study and Teaching Publisher, 2007; co-author)
Everyday Chinese (Thompson Publications, 2006; co-author)
Pedagogical Chinese Grammar (Beijing Language University Press, 2017)
Legal Chinese (Beijing, Foreign Language Study and Teaching Publisher, 2007; co-author)
A Primer of Classical Chinese (Columbia University Press; co-author)
A Primer of Chinese (Columbia University Press, 2003; co-author)
The Grammaticalization of Chinese Conjunctive Adverbs (The University of Michigan Press, 1996)
A Concise Dictionary of Chinese Traditional Linguistics (Shaanxi People’s Press, 1990; co-author).
A Study of Zhuoan Yunwu (Zhonghua Book House, 1988; co-author)

Feng Li

Feng Li

Professor of Early Chinese History and Archaeology

Office: 422 Kent Hall
Office Hours: T 4-6 PM
Phone: (212) 854-2510
Email: fl123@columbia.edu

Educational Background

MA: Institute of Archaeology (’86)
PhD: University of Chicago (’00)

Research Interests

Early Chinese Archaeology, Bronze-Age Cultures, Early Imperialisms, History of Literacy

Professor Li received his MA from the Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He also did Ph.D. work in the University of Tokyo (1991). He is both a historian of Early China specializing in bronze inscriptions of the Shang-Zhou period, and an active field archaeologist. His past work has addressed the complex relationship between geography and political processes in the collapse of a prominent Bronze-Age state, and the performance of the earliest bureaucracy in China and the nature of the early Chinese state. Professor Li’s work engages both epigraphic-textual and material evidence and offers question-led interpretations of Bronze-Age society and culture in comparative frameworks. He directed Columbia’s first archaeological field project in China in 2006-2011. In recent years, he is undertaking the writing of the Economic History of Late Bronze-Age China (ca. 1000-500 BC). He founded and co-chaired the Columbia Early China Seminar in 2002-2012, and is co-editor of Tang Center Series in Early China. See his personal website for a fuller list of publications.

Selected English (and bilingual) language Publications:

Guicheng: A Study of the Formation of States on the Jiaodong Peninsula in Late Bronze-Age China, 1000-500 BCE (chief co-editor, Science Press, 2018).

Early China: A Social and Cultural History (Cambridge, 2014)

Writing and Literacy in Early China (co-editor; UW Press, 2013)

Bureaucracy and the State in Early China: Governing the Western Zhou (Cambridge, 2008)

Landscape and Power in Early China: The Crisis and Fall of the Western Zhou, 1045-771 BC (Cambridge, 2006)