Rey Chow

Rey Chow's research comprises theoretical, interdisciplinary, and textual analyses. Since her years as a doctoral student at Stanford University, she has specialized in studying cultural forms through language, image, and sound (with particular attention to East Asia, Western Europe, and North America) and in the discursive encounters among modernity, postcoloniality, sexuality, and ethnicity. Her publications include over 120 peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and substantive interviews, as well as the following books:

1991       Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading between West and East, U of Minnesota P 
(Chinese translation, 1995; Japanese translation, 2003)

1993       Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies, Indiana UP 
(Japanese translation, 1998; Korean translation, 2005)

1995       Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema, Columbia UP (Japanese translation, 1999; Chinese translation, 2001; Korean translation, 2004)

1995       (In Chinese translation) Xie zai jia guo yi wai, Oxford UP (Hong Kong)

1998       Ethics after Idealism: Theory–Culture–Ethnicity–Reading, Indiana UP (Chinese translation, 2013)

2002       The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Columbia UP

2004       (In Italian translation) Il sogno di Butterfly: costellazioni postcoloniali, Meltemi editore (Rome)

2006       The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work, Duke UP (Italian translation, 2007; Bulgarian translation, 2010; Chinese translation, 2011; Japanese translation, 2014)

2007       Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films: Attachment in the Age of Global Visibility, Columbia UP (Chinese translation, 2019)

2010       The Rey Chow Reader, ed. Paul Bowman, Columbia UP

2012       Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture, Duke UP

2014       Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience, Columbia UP
(Chinese translation, 2024)

2021       A Face Drawn in Sand: Humanistic Inquiry and Foucault in the Present, Columbia UP

1999       Special Issue, differences 11.2 (1999): “Writing in the Realm of the Senses,” ed. with intro.

2000      Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field, ed. with intro., Duke UP

2005       Special Issue, Comparative Literature Studies 42.4: “Between Languages,” co-edited with intro., with Réda Bensmaïa

2011       Special Issue, differences 22.2 & 3 (2011): “The Sense of Sound,” co-edited with intro., with James A. Steintrager
2019      Sound Objects, co-edited with intro., with James A. Steintrager, Duke UP

Chow’s book Primitive Passions was awarded the James Russell Lowell Prize by the Modern Language Association. She has held research fellowships and grants (from the Pembroke Center at Brown University, the McKnight Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the ACLS, the NEH, and the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University), distinguished professorships, and distinguished visiting professorships, as well as being invited to deliver keynotes and endowed lectures at institutions around the world. Chow currently serves on the editorial and advisory boards of about sixty academic journals, book series, research centers, and postdoctoral research funding agencies worldwide. She is a coeditor of the longstanding book series Asia Pacific, published by Duke University Press. Chow’s books and articles have been widely excerpted, anthologized, and translated into numerous Asian and European languages. Special issues (of the journals Postcolonial Studies and Social Semiotics) and a monograph, Reading Rey Chow (by Paul Bowman), have been devoted to her work.  

Chow is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.