Overview
Lu is a PhD candidate in Hispanic Studies. With broad interests in Latin American literature and visual cultures, her work especially focuses on Mexico and the Hispanophone Caribbean in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Her current project, Reclaiming Exploration: Extraterrestrial Desire and Belonging in Latin American Speculative Cultural Production, examines how aspirations toward outer space connect with recent Latin American history, concerning decolonization, globalization, and nuclear crisis. Through literature, cinema, and popular cultures, this project contemplates how dynamics such as failure, loss, and excess challenge the patriarchal, colonial, and anthropocentric paradigms that frame exploration as conquest and extraction. It shows how artworks draw together our individual body and the vast universe by exposing homologous structures of violence they both endure, while imagining spaces of belonging that transcend human and non-human boundaries.
Prior to Cornell, Lu worked as an assistant curator, editor, and project coordinator at the Power Station of Art in Shanghai and the Shanghai Biennial. She also translated Ricardo Piglia’s La ciudad ausente into Chinese.
While finalizing her dissertation, Lu recently wrote a personal essay titled “Chifan/Chifa,” which explores food and migration, drawing on her travel to Lima and her own migration experience in Canada. She is now completing another essay, reflecting on the global divergence of socialist legacies, from her perspective as a Latinamericanist who studies Cuba and its futuristic imaginations, and as someone who grew up in 1990s Northern China during the country’s early stage of economic reform.