Lillian Lu

What excites you most about joining our School of Arts and Humanities community?

“I am looking forward to many things, including getting students attuned to the weirdness of 18^th century literature and able to draw transhistorical connections. I am perhaps most excited about paying the work of my mentors forward. When I began my career in literary studies, I felt very alone and clueless about ‘how to do’ the discipline. Educators who believed in me guided me—without molding me into a 2.0 version of themselves—and helped me become the thinker I wanted to be​. I hope to lift students up in a similar way and help them hone their own voices and critical thinking.”

Why did you choose your field? Why should students consider studying the arts and humanities?

“I went into graduate school thinking I would study Modernism or the Gothic, but I took an 18^th century seminar on gender and satire taught by Professor Helen Deutsch that changed my life and way of thinking. I love that the 18^th century novel as a form was still very much in flux, figuring out what it was. I love the queerness of the novel form at the time.”

“I am also interested in the formation of Enlightenment thought and how it has shaped western culture and has—as the saying in the field goes—caused a lot of the problems we are faced with today. I study the 18^th century to better understand the world we live in now and that there are other possible worlds we can work towards and create.​ This sort of transhistorical, transmedial thinking is what I hope to foster in my classroom.”

What research or project are you working on currently?

“I am currently working on a research project on race and the Regency novel. I am also working on my own fiction writing about gaysians in the Regency.”

What’s your favorite class to teach and why?

“My favorite unit to teach at the moment is techno-Orientalism. Edward Said's writing has been important to the formation of my scholarship; I remember reading his work on Orientalism as an undergrad and again as a grad. It was the kind of work that, once I read it, I couldn't not see the tropes and rhetoric everywhere.”

“Techno-Orientalism extends this theory into sci-fi and fantasy narratives. I'm looking forward to hearing students' observations about their own media experiences with these ideas and discussing how we might challenge these pernicious age-old tropes—​in speculative fiction, in analytical work and in our own daily lives​.”

What is something about yourself that is not typically included in your bio?

“I absolutely love vampire stories. Talk to me about them!”

Professor Lu (she/they) is a kidlit and fantasy author as well as scholar who specializes in the global Anglophone long 18^th century novel. For them, creative and critical writing are mutually constitutive. They serve as a section editor of the forthcoming K-media magazine, MENT. Their fiction work can be found in places such as Prismatica, Yuzu Press and Heartlines Spec, and their critical work can be found in Eighteenth Century Fiction and The Rambling. Lu holds a Ph.D. in English from UCLA.