Petrus Liu

Petrus Liu received his BA with a triple major in German Literature, Comparative Literature, and East Asian Languages and his MA and PhD in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley. Prior to joining the inaugural faculty at Yale-NUS College, he was Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Cornell University. Liu has received a variety of academic honors and awards, including a J Y Pillay Fellowship, Modern Language Association’s Council of Learned Journals and Editors Prize for Best Journal Special Issue, a Telluride Faculty Scholarship, finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, and a Cornell Society for the Humanities Fellowship.

Liu’s research focuses on modern Chinese and comparative literature; critical theory and cultural studies; transnational queer studies; theories and history of the novel; and the aesthetics of Cold War cultures. His publications include the books Stateless Subjects: Chinese Martial Arts Literature and Postcolonial History (Ithaca: Cornell East Asia Series, 2011) and Queer Marxism in Two Chinas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).

Whilst at the ICI Berlin, Liu will be working on his current book project, Cold War Aesthetics in Queer Asia, which is a re-theorization of Cold War historiography as a “queer narrative of the present” that combines political accounts of Asian neoliberalism with theories of queer temporalities and erotohistoriography.

This project grows out of his second book Queer Marxism in Two Chinas and represents a new phase in his long-standing interest in the intersection of theories of queer temporality and Cold War studies.