Research Interests for Rey Chow

Research Interests: Literature, film, critical and cultural theory, postcolonial studies

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.

Keywords:
literature, film, Asia, Europe, modernity, sexuality, postcoloniality, ethnicity, poststructuralist, visual, digital, media
Representative Publications
  1. Chow, R, Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading Between West and East (1991), pp. xvii+198 pages, University of Minnesota Press
  2. Chow, R, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (1993), pp. x + 238 pages, Indiana University Press
  3. Chow, R, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (1995), pp. xiv + 252 pages, Columbia University Press, ISBN 9780231076838
  4. Chow, R, Ethics after Idealism: Theory – Culture – Ethnicity – Reading (1998), pp. xxiii + 236 pages, Indiana University Press
  5. Chow, R, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (2002), pp. x + 237 pages, Columbia University Press, ISBN 9780231504485
  6. Chow, R, The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work (2006), pp. x + 128 pages, Duke University Press
  7. Chow, R, The Rey Chow Reader, edited by Bowman, P (2010), pp. xxiii + 289 pages, Columbia University Press
  8. Chow, R, Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture (2012), Duke University Press