Professor Lydia H. Liu

Lydia H. Liu is the Wun Tsun Tam Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University.

Professor Liu has published extensively on critical translation theory, Chinese and comparative literature, digital media, political thought, and the philosophy of language. She is the author of The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious (Chicago, 2010) among her many books in English and Chinese. Her past work has been supported by John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and other grants and fellowships. Her co-edited volume The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Feminism with Rebecca Karl and Dorothy Ko (Columbia, 2013) is listed as one of the Essential Reads on Feminism by New York Public Library. A bilingual writer, her experimental fiction The Nesbit Code in Chinese won the 2014 Hong Kong Book Award. She is also the co-editor (with Wan Shiguo) of the first annotated edition (2016) of Natural Justice & Equity in Chinese, the radical Chinese anarchist journals of the early 20th century. Her most recent book is Global Language Justice (co-edited with Anupama Rao and Charlotte Silverman) published by Columbia University Press in 2023.

In October-December 2025, Lydia Liu will be Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall and Needham Research Fellow at Needham Research Institute at the University of Cambridge. Her project is called “The Machine Interlingua” which explores the work of AI pioneers at the Cambridge Language Research Unit (CLRU), one of the first AI research centers founded by Margaret Masterman. Long before large language models (LLMs) became possible for AI, Masterman and her research team had developed the machine interlingua, mechanical thesauri, semantic algorithms, and numerous other procedures in the 1950s-1960s to perform word-sense disambiguation, machine translation, computerized haiku poetry, etc., all of which greatly impacted the direction of subsequent AI innovations.