Professor of Chinese & Comparative Literature and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies
Fall 2025 Office Hours: Tuesdays 1:00-3:00 and Wednesdays 12:15-1:15.
Petrus Liu is Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature and of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Boston University. He received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (Chinese, German, and Latin) from the University of California, Berkeley in 2005, and previously taught at Cornell University and Yale-NUS College before joining BU in 2017. His research interests lie at the intersection of queer theory and Marxist cultural criticism, extending across modern Chinese and comparative literature, digital media, capitalism and the novel, and new social movements in the global South. He is currently working on a new project on value-form theory and Marxist interpretations of culture.
He is the author of three scholarly monographs:
- Stateless Subjects: Chinese Martial Arts Literature and Postcolonial History (Cornell East Asia Series, 2011)
- Queer Marxism in Two Chinas (Duke University Press, 2015), which received Honorable Mention for the Alan Bray Memorial Book Award and was a finalist for the 2016 Lambda Literary Award
- The Specter of Materialism: Queer Theory and Marxism in the Age of the Beijing Consensus (Duke University Press, 2023), winner of the 2024 Alan Bray Memorial Award. This work offers a new approach to the political economy of sexuality through a decentered history of global capitalism’s recent mutations and queer embodiment.
Prof. Liu is also coeditor (with Lisa Rofel) and cotranslator of Platinum Bible of the Public Toilet (Duke University Press, 2024), a collection of queer fiction by Chinese writer Cui Zi’en.
His other publications include the coedited special issue of the journal positions: asia critique, “Beyond the Strai(gh)ts: Transnationalism and Queer Chinese Politics,” which received the Modern Language Association’s Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ) Award for Best Journal Special Issue of 2010. He has also published three collections of film commentary released simultaneously in English, Chinese, Spanish, and French, and journals articles in Social Text; South Atlantic Quarterly; Modern Language Quarterly; GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies; Feminist Studies; positions: asia critique; The Funambulist; Asian Exchange; Modern Chinese Literature and Culture; Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature; Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies; Inter-Asia Cultural Studies; Genre en Action; Kaos Queer+; Sexuality Policy Watch; Router: A Journal of Cultural Studies; Refeng xueshu; and The China Journal. His work has been translated into Chinese, German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Turkish, and Russian. Liu’s work was the subject of a discussion forum in a special issue of Dialogues in Human Geography (March 2025).
Prof. Liu serves on the executive editorial board of Critical Times: Interventions in Global Critical Theory and is a member of the editorial collective of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies and the standing review board of Hong Kong’s Research Grants Council.
Prof. Liu has been the recipient of fellowships from the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the National Humanities Center, the Cornell Society for the Humanities, the Institute for Cultural Inquiry Berlin, the J Y Pillay Global-Asia Programme, and the Telluride House. He has also received two multiyear research grants from the Ford Foundation. In 2023, he was awarded Boston University’s Gitner Award for Distinguished Teaching.
