Catherine Liu

Catherine Liu is Professor in the Departments of Film and Media Studies/Visual Studies, Comparative Literature, and English at the University of California, Irvine, where she also served as Director of the UCI Humanities Center. She previously taught at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and Bard College before joining UCI.

Her research and teaching focus on the intellectual history and formation of cultural criticism, the history of the professional-managerial class, psychoanalytic theory, the political economy of cultural revolutions, and the work of the Frankfurt School and Walter Benjamin. She has also published widely on art criticism, museum history, psychoanalysis, and cultural politics.

She is the author of The American Idyll: Academic Anti-Elitism as Cultural Critique, which traces the genealogy of contemporary anti-elitism and situates today’s populist discourse within a broader historical context. In Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class, she examines the role of the professional-managerial class in shaping contemporary social and political life, arguing that its emphasis on meritocracy and philanthropy can impede efforts toward structural economic redistribution. Her most recent book, Traumatised: The New Politics of Suffering, explores the rise of trauma as a dominant framework in public discourse, weaving together its intellectual history and implications for contemporary society.

She is also the author of the novel Oriental Girls Desire Romance, Copying Machines: Taking Notes for the Automaton, the essay “Lacan’s Afterlife: Jacques Lacan Meets Andy Warhol” in The Cambridge Companion to Lacan, and co-editor of The Dreams of Interpretation: A Century Down the Royal Road.

Liu received her B.A. from Yale College and her Ph.D. from the CUNY Graduate Center.