Lye (Ph.D., Columbia) is an associate professor of English at UC Berkeley, where she teaches courses on Marxism and critical theory, Asian American studies and 20th- and 21st-century literature. She is affiliated with the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory and the Department of Rhetoric. She is a founding member of the Marxist Institute for Research (MIR). Lye is a member of the editorial boards of Representations, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies and Postmodern Culture. Besides these venues, her writing has appeared in Modern Languages Quarterly, PMLA, South Atlantic Quarterly, American Literature, American Literary History, Interventions, Novel, Positions, The Journal of Asian American Studies, Public Books and Commune.
Most recently, Lye is the co-editor of After Marx: Literature, Theory and Value in the Twenty-First Century (with Christopher Nealon, Cambridge 2022). Her book America's Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893-1945 (Princeton 2005) received the Cultural Studies Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies and was named a finalist for the John Hope Franklin Prize from the American Studies Association and a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. She has co-edited numerous special journal issues on the topics of peripheral realism, Asian racial form, financialization and the humanities and university struggles. The dossier The Struggle for Public Education in California (coedited with Christopher Newfield) appeared in a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly that won MLA's Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ) Award for Best Special Issue of 2011.
Lye is writing a book on reconstruction of Asian American literary and theoretical contributions to Marxism in the United States since the 1960s, with an emphasis on Asian American perspectives into questions of racial capitalism and social reproduction.
