Lisa Lowe

About

Lisa Lowe is the Samuel Knight Professor of American Studies at Yale University. She received her B.A. in History from Stanford University and her Ph.D. in Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz. As an interdisciplinary scholar, her work is concerned with the analysis of race, immigration, capitalism, and colonialism. Her research explores these themes through various cultural and historical lenses, contributing significantly to the fields of American Studies and Asian American cultural politics. Her teaching interests include the study of race and liberalism, immigration and U.S. empire, colonial domesticity and social reproduction, and cultures of globalization. Lowe has authored several influential books and articles, and her research has been supported by prestigious fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Mellon Foundations, among others. Her scholarly work continues to engage with critical questions surrounding global humanities, transpacific entanglements, and revolutionary feminisms, making her a prominent figure in contemporary academic discourse.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Gender studies
• Law
• Political economy
• Criminology
• Economics
• Demographic economics
• Engineering
• Epistemology

Selected publications

• Comparative Global Humanities After Man: Alternatives to the Coloniality of Knowledge

  Theory Culture & Society · 2019-07-19 · 109 citations

  article1st author

  The core concept of ‘the human’ that anchors so many humanities disciplines – history, literature, art history, philosophy, religion, anthropology, political theory, and others – issues from a very particular modern European definition of Man ‘over-represented’ as the human. The history of modernity and of modern disciplinary knowledge formations are, in this sense, a history of modern European forms monopolizing the definition of the human and placing other variations at a distance from the hum…

  PublisherDOI

• History Hesitant

  Social Text · 2015-12-01 · 92 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article explores under what conditions, with what methods, and in relation to what materials the question of recovery with respect to slavery and freedom can be posed. Accounts of Black Atlantic and African American slavery are central to understanding enslavement and the terrains of struggles for freedom, yet the questioning of recovery also requires a critical examination of the genealogy of freedom itself. The author argues that liberalism did not contradict slavery, but rather served as…

  PublisherDOI

• Canon, Institutionalization, Identity:

  University of Minnesota Press eBooks · 2018-05-05 · 24 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 1 Immigration, Citizenship, Racialization: Asian American Critique

  Duke University Press eBooks · 2020 · 8 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Dialectics of Abolition

  American Quarterly · 2023 · 4 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  The Dialectics of Abolition Lisa Lowe (bio) Ruth Wilson Gilmore has devoted decades to the study of the prison-industrial complex and to organizing for its abolition, and her profound contributions have become cornerstones of carceral studies and the prison abolition movement owing to their compelling explanatory power. Her famous formulations that "capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines it"1 and that "racism is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Peter Elliot Weiss

  University of Toronto

  1 shared

• Alice Yang Murray

  University of California, Santa Cruz

  1 shared

• Kris Manjapra

  Tufts University

  1 shared

• Gordon Armstrong

  International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry

  1 shared

• John Bacon‐Shone

  1 shared

• Kent A. Ono

  1 shared

• Hans‐Joachim Braun

  Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maíz Y Trigo

  1 shared

• Sharankumar Limbale

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Guggenheim Fellowship
• Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship
• Mellon Foundation Fellowship
• School of Advanced Study at the University of London Fellows…
• UC Humanities Research Institute Fellowship

Similar researchers at Yale University

• Laura Wexlerh-50
• Charles Musserh-21
• Joanne Meyerowitzh-17