Scholar. Writer. Activist

Wen Liu is a Taiwanese scholar, writer, and activist based in Taipei. She is Assistant Research Professor at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica. She received her Ph.D. in Critical Social Psychology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York in 2017. She is affiliated with the Department of Sociology, National Taiwan University. Liu’s first book with the University of Illinois Press in 2024, Feeling Asian American: Racial Flexibility between Assimilation and Oppression (winner of the 2018 National Women’s Studies Association First Book Prize), investigates diasporic Asian American subjectivities and affective geopolitical alignment in times of US-China inter-imperial rivalry. The project illustrates the historical and contemporary articulations of Asian Americanness in the intertwined geopolitical relations between the US and the Asia Pacific using ethnography, narrative, archive, and discourse analysis.  

As an interdisciplinary scholar, Liu is interested in developing a critical psychological and affective analysis of transpacific geopolitics to examine queer mobilization, sovereignty, security, and militarism in Sinophone and diasporic Asian communities. For instance, she has investigated how affects of paranoia, melancholia, and shame have played a role in constituting Sinophone Asian people’s (Taiwanese Americans, Hongkongers, diasporic Asian Americans) national, racial, ethnic, and sexual subjectivities beyond the binaristic framework of East vs. West, democracy vs. authoritarianism, assimilation vs. rejection. Liu has co-edited a book volume, Reorienting Hong Kong’s Struggle: Leftism, Decoloniality, and Internationalism (2022) with Palgrave Macmillan. You can check out her recent research projects here.

劉文，批判社會心理學者與作家，現任中央研究院民族學研究所助研究員。2017年於紐約市立大學研究院的批判社會心理所取得博士，並曾於紐約州立大學奧爾巴尼分校的婦女與性別研究系所擔任助理教授。劉文目前也是臺灣大學社會系的兼任助理教授，開設酷兒理論相關課程。研究專長為酷兒理論、跨國女性主義、情動研究、批判種族理論、中美帝國之下的亞太平洋地緣政治，以及亞裔美國人主體性。學術工作之外，關注性別與種族正義的運動，也撰寫文學和電影的評論。長年旅居美國後，現居於臺北，臺灣。

These scholarly endeavors result from not only Liu's theoretical engagement but also her activist involvement in facilitating queer activist dialogue between New York, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. (check out the podcasts she did with Time to Say Goodbye and with North American Taiwan Studies Association on the history and politics of Taiwan in light of the “new Cold War,” and another podcast interview on queer and affect theory). Having participated in social movements globally and especially in East Asia, she is a member of an online publication and Tapie-based activist network, New Bloom 破土, dedicated to the intellectual dialogues, activism, and youth culture about and beyond Taiwan since 2014.

Beyond her academic and activist engagements, Liu is a published novelist and poet.  Her first book 《一則必要的告解｜A Necessary Confession 》,  a collection of short stories and poems, was published in 2006 by Unitas. Her full-length novel《集體心碎日記｜Diary of Collective Heartbreak 》was published in 2012 by Fembooks. Her writings address diasporic queer Asian subject's struggles of racialization, queer violence, and loneliness, but also the possibility for pleasure, solidarity, and new ways of belonging in the transnational urban queer space.

See more information about Liu’s creative writings in the creative section.