Tani Barlow

WEBSITE(S)| Department of History | Department of Transnational Asian Studies | Chao Center for Asian Studies

Professor Barlow is accepting advanced graduate students in the field of Modern Chinese history with an emphasis in late 19th and early 20th century politics, media and consumer culture. Applicants with capacity to handle data sets, image analysis, cultural theory and business history particularly welcomed to apply. She is an affiliate with the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Rice.

Tani Barlow is George and Nancy Rupp Professor of Humanities and Professor of History. Her focus is Chinese intellectual and women's history. She is the author of In the Event of Women (Duke University Press, forthcoming, 2018), The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism (Duke University Press, 2004), and Inter/National Feminism and China, Ito Ruri and Kobayashi Eri, trans., (Tokyo: Ochanomizu Press, 2003). In addition, Barlow has edited and co-edited nine published books, including The World Looks at China: Twenty Years of positions: asia critique (Nanjing University Press, 2016, in Chinese), The Modern Girl, Colonial Modernity, and East Asia (Iwanami Shoten, in Japanese, 2008); New Asian Marxisms (Duke University Press, 2002); Cinema and Desire: The Cultural Politics of Feminist Marxist Dai Jinhua (Verso, 2002); and I Myself Am a Woman: Selected Writings of Ding Ling (Beacon Press, 1999). Barlow has published twenty papers in edited books, about forty articles in academic journals, edited or co-edited forty-seven journal issues, and curated a contemporary arts festival.

Professor Barlow is the founding senior editor of positions: asia critique, an international, four time prize winning journal which she continues to edit. Barlow has held Visiting Professorships at the Institute of Advanced Study at Shanghai’s Jiaotong University, Beijing’s Tsinghua University, Nanjing University’s Institute for Advanced Studies; Japan's Hitotsubashi and Ochanomizu Universities; and the University of Bologna, Italy over the last years. Professor Barlow has founded or co-founded nine collaborative research projects, including the Rockefeller Foundation Grant in the Humanities, “Project for Critical Asian Studies” and the Luce Foundation's “Ephemera Project.” Her most recently published articles include "Sexual Difference in Foundational Chinese Marxist Sociology: Qu Qiuba and Li Da on Female Centered Evolution), in Remapping, Vol.4, (Beijing, 2016, in Chinese), “History’s Coffin Can Never Be Closed: On Qu Qiubai and Translation,” special issue of Boundary 2 (42:3, 2016) “What is the Problem? Digital Studies and Professional Historians,” in Digital Humanities: Between Past, Present, and Future, (Taipei: Research Center for Digital Humanities, DADH, National Taiwan University, Taiwan, 2017), and “Commercial Advertising Art in Late 19th and early 20th Century ‘China,’” in Martin Powers and Katherine Tsiang, eds, Blackwell Companion to Chinese Art, (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015). Tani Barlow is co-founder of the Chinese Commercial Advertising Archive with Professor Chen Jing of Nanjing University.

Selected Essay Publications:

  • "Body and Soul: Anglo-America Asianisms,1870-1995,” Contemporary Asianisms, Nicola Spakowski and Mark Frey, eds., National University of Singapore Press, 2016
     
  • “Commercial Advertising Art in Late 19th and early 20th Century ‘China,’” in Martin Powers and Katherine Tsiang, eds, Blackwell Companion to Chinese Art, Wiley-Blackwell, 2015
     
  • "Event, Abyss, Excess: the Event of Women in Chinese Commercial Advertisement,1910s-1930s," in differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies, 24:2,2013
     
  • “‘What is a poem?’ History and the Modern Girl,” in David Palumbo-Liu, Bruce Robbins & Nirvana Tanoukhi. Immanuel Wallerstein and the Problem of the World: System, Scale and Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011)

Selected Publications: 

  • “History’s Coffin Can Never Be Closed: On Qu Qiubai and Translation,” special issue of Boundary 2 42:3, 2016

  • "Body and Soul: Anglo-America Asianisms, 1870-1995,” Contemporary Asianisms, NicolaSpakowski and Mark Frey, eds., National University of Singapore Press, 2016

  • “Commercial Advertising Art in Late 19th and early 20th Century ‘China,’” in Martin Powers and Katherine Tsiang, eds, Blackwell Companion to Chinese Art, Wiley-Blackwell, 2015
     
  • "Event, Abyss, Excess: the Event of Women in Chinese Commercial Advertisement,1910s-1930s," in differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies, 24:2,2013
     
  • “‘What is a poem?’ History and the Modern Girl,” in David Palumbo-Liu, Bruce Robbins & Nirvana Tanoukhi. Immanuel Wallerstein and the Problem of the World: System, Scale,& Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011)
     
  • Co-editor (Ruri Ito, Hiroko Sakamoto), The Modern Girl, Colonial Modernity, and East Asia, 植民地的近代と東アジア:国際シンポジウム「モダンガールと植民地的近代—東アジ\ アにおける資本・帝国・ジェンダー」の一部として (Tokyo:  Iwanami shoten, 2010)
     
  • The Modern Girl Around the World, co-edited with Madeleine Dong, Uta Poiger, Priti Ramamurthy, Lynn Thomas, and Alys Weinbaum (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008)

Research Areas

Modern Chinese Intellectual History; Feminist Theory; Gender and Social Science

Teaching Areas

Modern Chinese Intellectual History

Feminist Theory

Gender and Social Science

Body

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