Petrus Liu is professor of Chinese & Comparative Literature and of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Boston University. He received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (Chinese, German, and Latin) from UC Berkeley in 2005 and taught at Cornell University and Yale-NUS College before joining BU in 2017. His research interests lie at the intersection of queer theory and Marxist cultural criticism, which he explores through publications and courses on modern Chinese and comparative literature, digital media, capitalism and the novel, and new social movements in the global South.
Liu is the author of three scholarly monographs: Stateless Subjects: Chinese Martial Arts Literature and Postcolonial History (Cornell East Asia Series, 2011); Queer Marxism in Two Chinas (Duke University Press, 2015), winner of the Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize Honorable Mention and a finalist for the 2016 Lambda Literary Award; and The Specter of Materialism: Queer Theory and Marxism in the Age of the Beijing Consensus (Duke University Press, 2023), a work that offers a new approach to the political economy of sexuality through a decentered history of global capitalism’s latest mutations and queer bodies. Liu is also the coeditor (with Lisa Rofel) and cotranslator of Platinum Bible of the Public Toilet (Duke University Press, 2024), a collection of queer stories by the Chinese writer Cui Zi’en.
Liu’s other publications include “Beyond the Strai(gh)ts: Transnationalism and Queer Chinese Politics,” a coedited special issue of the journal positions: asia critique that received the Modern Language Association’s Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ) Award for Best Journal Special Issue of 2010; three collections of film commentaries simultaneously published in English, Chinese, Spanish, and French; and journal articles in Social Text; South Atlantic Quarterly; Modern Language Quarterly; GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies; Feminist Studies; positions: asia critique; The Funambulist; Asian Exchange; Modern Chinese Literature and Culture; Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature; Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies; Inter-Asia Cultural Studies; Genre en Action; Kaos Queer+; Sexuality Policy Watch; Router: A Journal of Cultural Studies; Refeng xueshu; and The China Journal. His works have been translated into Chinese, German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Turkish, and Russian.
The lecture is sponsored by the Liu Institute's Chinese Working Group. The event is free and open to the public. 

Lunch Provided - Please Bring Beverages
In support of the Liu Institute’s growing commitment to sustainability, we will no longer be offering drinks at our public lectures and panels. We encourage audience members to bring their water bottles or to drink from nearby water fountains.

 
Originally published at asia.nd.edu.