Bio
Hello! I’m David Palumbo-Liu
The Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University
My fields of interest include social and cultural criticism, studies in race and ethnicity, human rights, environmental justice, and the specific role that literature and the humanities play in helping us address each of these areas. I have published in each of these areas, including seven books and numerous articles that have been translated into Chinese, German, French and Portuguese. My most recent book is Speaking Out of Place: Getting Our Political Voices Back (Haymarket Books). All of my books can be viewed on my Books page.
I trained at the University of California, Berkeley in East Asian area studies, classical Chinese literature, and comparative literature. My graduate work focused on Chinese literature and on literary criticism and theory. I spent one year in Taiwan studying Chinese language, and one year in Kyoto as a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council. There I researched Japanese scholarship on classical Chinese literature at Kyoto University and at the Research Institute for Humanistic Studies, and was appointed a fellow at both institutions. I received my PhD in Comparative Literature from Berkeley in 1988.
While pursuing a PhD in comparative literature at Berkeley, I began working in Asian American studies as well, teaching courses on Asian American history and literature and ethnic studies. Upon completion of the PhD, I accepted a joint appointment as assistant professor in Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and Department of English, where I taught courses on Chinese literature and American ethnic literature, literary criticism and theory, and comparative literature.
In 1990, I joined the Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford. I was a founding faculty member of Stanford’s Program in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CSRE), which was established in 1997.
In 1994 I declined a visiting appointment at Harvard in order to accept a year’s fellowship leave at the Stanford Humanities Center. In 1998 I spent the fall term teaching courses on immigration, decolonization, and exoticism at the Stanford Program in Paris–I returned to teach courses in human rights in 2018, and participated in many political and intellectual events surrounding the fiftieth anniversary of Mai ’68. In autumn 2011 I taught at the Oxford campus and gave a series of talks at Wadham and Brasenose colleges, and at the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford.
In 2007 I was offered the Jackman Chair in Humanities and the Arts at the University of Toronto.
My public writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Jacobin, Truthout, The Nation, The Guardian, AlterNet, Salon, Al Jazeera, and other venues. All my blogs are on my website.
I am currently working on a second book for Haymarket, tentatively entitled, More Than Survival: Learning for the Future.
As an activist I am involved with the struggle for Palestinian rights, and other groups such as the Rohingya, Uyghurs, and Tibetans, the people of Kashmir, Indigenous peoples in general. I am part of the Organizing Collective of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI), and the Campus Antifascist Network.
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