Catherine Liu

American cultural theorist

Catherine Liu

Academic background
Education	Yale College
Alma mater	CUNY Graduate Center
Thesis	Reading machines: fiction, femininity, automaton in ancien régime France (1994)
Academic work
Institutions	University of California, Irvine

Catherine Liu (born 1964) is an American cultural theorist and author whose areas of research include Sinophone cinema, French literature, critical theory, identity politics, and visual arts. She is known for her critique of the professional–managerial class.

Education and career

Liu earned a B.A. from Yale College^[1] and a Ph.D. from CUNY Graduate Center. She previously taught at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities and Bard College before accepting a position at the University of California, Irvine.^[2] Liu is professor in the Departments of Film and Media Studies/Visual Studies, Comparative Literature and English at the University of California, Irvine, where she also served as director of the UCI Humanities Center.^[2] As President of the Western Humanities Alliance, she edited a special issue of the Western Humanities Review (2016) on the topic of prestige.^[3] For several years she organized a project about urban history and planned communities.^[4]

Research

Her research and teaching focuses on the intellectual history and formation of cultural criticism, the history of the professional-managerial class, psychoanalytic theory, the political economy of cultural revolutions, and the work of the Frankfurt School and Walter Benjamin. She has also published on various topics in art criticism, museum history, and cultural politics.

In 2000, she published Copying Machines: Taking Notes for the Automaton with the University of Minnesota Press.^[5] In 2011, she published The American Idyll: Academic Anti-Elitism as Cultural Critique with the University of Iowa Press which addresses the abuse of populist mistrust of elites and its relationship to anti-intellectualism in American cultural politics. Her most recent book published in 2021, Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class,^[6] is a polemical call to reject making a virtue out of taste and consumption habits. She argues that the class stands in the way of social justice and economic redistribution by promoting meritocracy, philanthropy, and other self-serving operations as an individualist path to a better world. She is also co-editor of the 2007 book, The Dreams of Interpretation: A Century down the Royal Road, a reexamination of the legacy of Freud.^[7]

Selected publications

Liu, Catherine (2021). Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 978-1-4529-6645-8. OCLC 1235762749.
Liu, Catherine (2012). Oriental Girls Desire Romance (second ed.). New York: Kaya Press. ISBN 978-1-885030-90-0. OCLC 698170951.
Liu, Catherine (2011). The American Idyll: Academic Anti-Elitism as Cultural Critique. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. ISBN 978-1609380502. OCLC 712644571.
Liu, Catherine (2000). Copying Machines: Taking Notes for the Automaton. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 978-0-8166-9113-5. OCLC 191818094.

References

^ "Catherine Liu | University of California, Irvine - Academia.edu". uci.academia.edu. Retrieved 2022-07-14.
^ ^a ^b "UC Irvine - Faculty Profile System - Catherine Liu". www.faculty.uci.edu. Retrieved 2022-06-18.
^ Liu, Catherine (2016). "The Values of Prestige – Western Humanities Review". Western Humanities Review. Retrieved 2022-06-18.
^ "How to Live in Irvine: Model Cities and Master Plans". uchri.org. Retrieved 2022-06-18.
^
Reviews of Copying Machines
- Forrest, Jennifer (2002). "Review of Copying Machines: Taking Notes for the Automaton". South Central Review. 19/20: 161–163. doi:10.2307/3190148. ISSN 0743-6831. JSTOR 3190148.
- Barbour, Charles (2003). "Copying Machines: Taking Notes for the - ProQuest". Canadian Literature: 151–153.
^
Reviews of Virtue Hoarders
- Moe, Lukas (2021-07-20). "Courtiers and Sycophants: Catherine Liu's Case Against the Professional Managerial Class". Los Angeles Review of Books. Retrieved 2022-03-13.
- Schansberg, Eric (August 13, 2021). "Under the thumb of the Professional Managerial Class". Shelby News. Retrieved 2022-03-13.
- Shullenberger, Geoff (2021-01-22). "The dictatorship of virtue". Washington Examiner. Retrieved 2022-06-18.
^ Catherine Liu (2007). The dreams of interpretation : a century down the royal road. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 978-0-8166-5413-0. OCLC 191738010.
Reviewed by *Mosher, Michael R. (Mike) (2009). "Review of The Dreams of Interpretation: A Century down the Royal Road". Leonardo. 42 (5): 467. doi:10.1162/leon.2009.42.5.467a. ISSN 0024-094X. JSTOR 40540078. S2CID 191286784.