Rey Chow is an American cultural critic, specializing in 20th-century Chinese fiction and film, postcolonial theory and critical and cultural theory. The topics explored in her writings include literature, film and visual studies, sexuality

Human sexuality

Human sexuality is the awareness of gender differences, and the capacity to have erotic experiences and responses. Human sexuality can also be described as the way someone is sexually attracted to another person whether it is to opposite sexes , to the same sex , to either sexes , or not being...

 and gender

Gender

Gender is a range of characteristics used to distinguish between males and females, particularly in the cases of men and women and the masculine and feminine attributes assigned to them. Depending on the context, the discriminating characteristics vary from sex to social role to gender identity...

, postcolonialism

Postcolonialism

Post-colonialism is a specifically post-modern intellectual discourse that consists of reactions to, and analysis of, the cultural legacy of colonialism...

, ethnicity, and cross-cultural politic.

Chow is currently Anne Firor Scott Professor of Literature at Duke University

Duke University

Duke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco industrialist James B...

.

Life and works

Chow was born in Hong Kong. She received a B.A. at University of Hong Kong, and a doctorate in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University in 1986. In 1996, she became a professor in the Comparative Literature Program at the University of California, Irvine. Later, she became Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Brown University.