Liu is a scholar of cultural studies, critical theory, and political philosophy at the National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University. Her research areas encompass comparative literature, psychoanalysis, visual culture, Asian modernity, Taiwanese cultural mental history, and Chinese political philosophy. Recent research topics include geopolitics, biopolitics, border politics, internal colonialism, unequal citizenship, decolonization of knowledge, and art activism.

   After obtaining her Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1984, she returned to Taiwan and taught for over forty years. She served as the chair of the English Department at Fu Jen Catholic University, founded Taiwan's first Institute of Comparative Literature, and served as its founding director. In 2001, she transferred to National Chiao Tung University, where she founded the Institute of Social Research and Cultural Studies in 2002, serving as director for eleven years (2002-2004, 2008-2011, 2013-2019). She retired from the institute in 2021 and currently serves as the director of the International Center for Cultural Studies at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University.



   Liu has authored seven books and more than one hundred peer-reviewed articles. Her most representative works are the four-part series on the topology of the history of the cultural mentality of the Taiwan-China complex, completed over twenty years from 2000 to 2020:

   Orphan, Goddess, and the Writing of the Negative: The Performance of Our Symptoms (2000) examines how various performative works from the 1980s and 1990s depict the struggles and explorations of shifting cultural identities. By retrospectively exploring the era from the Japanese colonial period, through the martial law period, to the post-martial law period, it discusses how different forms of surrealist writing that transcend orthodoxy encapsulate the realities of their times. It also explores how artists use their writings to express a local Taiwanese consciousness that diverges from mainstream ideologies.

   The Perverted Heart: The Psychic Forms of Modernity (2004) contemplates why, in the first half of the twentieth century, Taiwan and China experienced a collective fascist imagination and how these imaginations unfolded various discourses and knowledge frameworks, forming what I call "psyche forms of modernity.” The Topology of Psyche: The Post-1895 Reconfiguration of Ethics (2011) analyzes how the foundation of the (national) "subject" is depicted and established within this discourse cluster of ethical reconstruction. It also explains how the concepts of "psyche-politics" and "ethical-political economy" illustrate that the ethical life of the (national) subject becomes capital that can be utilized by the state.

   One Divides into Two: Philosophical Archaeology of Modern Chinese Political Thought(2020) points out that Mao Zedong's 1957 dialectical argument "One Divides into Two" and the 1958 Taiwan Strait Crisis and strangulation policy involved various factors such as the Cold War dynamics, Sino-Soviet relations, Middle Eastern power shifts, anti-rightist campaigns, the Great Leap Forward, and so on. From Mao Zedong's 1937 "On Contradiction" to a series of articles in 1958, it reflects the complex overall structure of over-determination of the era and how they changed Mao's discourse position and subsequent political decisions. However, in the 1960s, European thinkers such as Althusser, Balibar, Badiou, etc., influenced by Mao, continued to use the dialectical thinking of "One Divides into Two" to analyze contemporary societies through materialist dialectical analysis. This book further revisits Chinese political thought, using late Qing political thinker Zhang Taiyan's philosophy as a representative of "emancipatory critical politics" in Chinese tradition.

   Her most recent book, The Topology of the History of Mentalities: How to Face the Contemporary? How to Comprehend the History? (2022) concludes the methodology of her research over the years and raises a fundamental question: How do the political situation of the times and the knowledge system, under their material conditions, dialectically influence contemporary knowledge work and shape the mental structure of subsequent generations? How can we observe the dynamic topological historical space of synchronous transformations? The book first connects Freud and Lacan with Althusser, Foucault, Agamben, and Badiou's topological concepts, explaining the positive and negative positions of the subject in language and thus positions "mental history topography." It then describes how the knowledge paradigm of the mid-to-late 19th century in the Chinese context laid the foundation for "ethical-political economy" and the discourse model of "psyche politics" in the modern state of the 20th century, discussing why this knowledge paradigm repeatedly appears in contemporary times, affecting different subjective positions and mental states. She explores how the historical process of the modern state in the 20th century influenced the emotional structure of individuals and the escape routes in creative works. Finally, she discusses how classical Chinese political philosophers like Fang Yizhi, Tan Sitong, and Zhang Taiyan used the wisdom of Zhuangzi and Buddhism to derive the dialectical critical power of exceptional spaces from established thought frameworks and their topological implications.

   Liu has served as the president of the Taiwan Association for Cultural Studies and editor-in-chief of the journal "Routers: A Journal of Cultural Studies" (2011-2017). She co-founded the "International Institute for Cultural Studies" (IICS) of the University System of Taiwan (UST) and the "Inter-Asia Cultural Studies International Degree Program" (2013) with colleagues from the University System of Taiwan, serving as the Institute's director and IACS program director until stepping down in 2024.

   She has led several large-scale transnational and interdisciplinary research projects to establish an internationally oriented academic platform in Taiwan. She has organized six research groups within the university and over ten academic research institutions across Eurasia to address urgent global issues through collaborative research. These projects include the Ministry of Education's special field research center "Conflict, Justice, and Decolonization: Critical Studies of Inter-Asian Societies" (2018-2022), "Conflict, Justice, and Decolonization: Asia in Transition in the 21st Century" (2023- 2027), the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI), and the A.W. Mellon Foundation-funded Global Humanities Institute (GHI) in "Migration, Logistics and Unequal Citizens in Contemporary Global Context" (2019-2022), and the Transit Asia Research Network (TARN) (2023-2027).

   Liu has received numerous academic honors, including the Ministry of Science and Technology Outstanding Research Award (2020), the National Science Council Humanities Research Center Publishing Award, the National Institute for Compilation and Translation Publishing Award (2020, 2011, 2004), a Fulbright Scholar full scholarship (1994), a visiting scholar at Harvard University's Department of Comparative Literature (1994), and invitations to serve as a visiting professor in Taiwan at Charles University in Prague (2002), Delhi University in India (2017), and a lecturer at the UCLA Center for Chinese Studies (2019).

   Liu is committed to education, viewing students as independent researchers, encouraging them to develop critical self-consciousness, engage with their society, raise questions, and address contemporary challenges. She supports students in founding the student-led CJD online journal, forming research groups, organizing People’s Theater workshops, executing woodcut print research teams, hosting Muslim film festivals, Palestinian forums, Ukrainian and Rohingya refugee forums, and self- publishing research groups. Over the years, Liu has supervised 29 doctoral dissertations and 58 master's theses. Her students come from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mainland China, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Italy, Belgium, Palestine, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, South Africa, Congo, and Haiti.