Research Bio

Colleen Lye (Ph.D., Columbia) is Associate Professor of English at UC Berkeley, where she teaches courses on marxism and critical theory, Asian American Studies, and 20th and 21st century literature. 

Lye is the coeditor of After Marx: Literature, Theory and Value in the Twenty-First Century (with Christopher Nealon, Cambridge 2022). Her book America's Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893-1945 (Princeton 2005) received the Cultural Studies Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies, and was named a finalist for the John Hope Franklin Prize from the American Studies Association and a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. She has coedited numerous special journal issues on the topics of peripheral realism, Asian racial form, financialization, and the humanities and university struggles. The dossier The Struggle for Public Education in California (coedited with Christopher Newfield) appeared in a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly that won MLA's Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ) Award for Best Special Issue of 2011. She is writing a book on Asian American literary and theoretical contributions to marxism in the United States in the global sixties.

Lye is affiliated with the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory and the Department of Rhetoric. She is Chair of the Asian American Research Center (AARC), and a founding and executive committee member of the UC systemwide Marxist Institute for Research (MIR). Lye currently serves on the editorial boards of Representations, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies and Postmodern Culture. Besides these venues, her writing has appeared in Modern Languages Quarterly, PMLA, South Atlantic Quarterly, American Literature, American Literary History, Interventions, Novel, Positions, The Journal of Asian American Studies, Public Books and Commune. 

Research Expertise and Interest

postcolonial theory, Marxism, critical theory, cultural studies, Asian American literature, 20th and 21st century literature, world literature