• Ph.D., Stanford University, 1986
• M.A., Stanford University, 1982
• B.A., University of Hong Kong (China), 1979

Research Interests:  

Chow's research comprises theoretical, interdisciplinary, and textual analyses. Since her years as a graduate student at Stanford University, she has specialized in the making of cultural forms such as literature and film (with particular attention to East Asia, Western Europe, and North America), and in the discursive encounters among modernity, sexuality, postcoloniality, and ethnicity. Her book PRIMITIVE PASSIONS was awarded the James Russell Lowell Prize by the Modern Language Association. Before coming to Duke, she was Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Brown University, where she held appointments in the Departments of Comparative Literature, English, and Modern Culture and Media. In her current work, Chow is concerned with the legacies of poststructuralist theory (in particular the work of Michel Foucault), the politics of language as a postcolonial phenomenon, and the shifting paradigms for knowledge and lived experience in the age of visual technologies and digitial media.

Representative Publications   (More Publications)

Books

• Chow, R. Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading Between West and East.  University of Minnesota Press, 1991 (xvii+198 pages pp.).
• Chow, R. Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies.  Indiana University Press, 1993 (x + 238 pages pp.).
• Chow, R. Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema.  Columbia University Press, 1995 (xiv + 252 pages pp.).
• Chow, R. Ethics after Idealism: Theory – Culture – Ethnicity – Reading.  Indiana University Press, 1998 (xxiii + 236 pages pp.).
• Chow, R. The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism.  Columbia University Press, 2002 (x + 237 pages pp.).
• Chow, R. The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work.  Duke University Press, 2006 (x + 128 pages pp.).
• Chow, R. The Rey Chow Reader.  edited by Bowman, P Columbia University Press, 2010 (xxiii + 289 pages pp.).
• Chow, R. Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture.  Duke University Press, 2012 .