Phi Beta Kappa Hosts Visiting Scholar Lydia Liu

UMW’s Phi Beta Kappa chapter, Kappa of Virginia, and the Department of English, Linguistics, and Communication are pleased to announce this year’s annual Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Lydia H. Liu.

Professor Liu is a theorist of media and translation, a professor of comparative literature, and a bilingual writer in Chinese and English. She is Wun Tsun Tam Professor in the Humanities, director of Columbia’s Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, and founding director of the Tsinghua-Columbia Center for Translingual and Transcultural Studies at Tsinghua University, Beijing. Her publications include The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making; Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity; and, more recently, The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory (co-editor/co-translator). As a creative writer in Chinese, she is the author of The Nesbit Code, a mock detective story.

Professor Liu’s talk, “Fables of Romantic Science: Robinson Crusoe’s Naval Career,” will assess how the Romantic refashioning of Robinson Crusoe was decisive in the invention of science fiction, colonial travelogue, and a number of other literary genres.

The talk is at 5:00 p.m. on Thursday, March 22, 2018, in Lee Hall 411. It is generously funded by the Wendy Shadwell ’63 Program Endowment in British Literature and is open to the public.