Yuan Gao is a PhD candidate in Chinese language and literature.
Yuan Gao, mostly known as Kevin by friends and colleague, is a PhD candidate in the program of Chinese Language and Literature. His interdisciplinary dissertation, “Corporeal Technology: Hydraulic Infrastructure and the Cultural Politics of Labor in China, 1952-1993,” brings infrastructure studies, a subfield in anthropology, to renew the knowledge of Chinese revolutionary cultural production and rural industrialization. His next project examines the infrastructural politics of the Burma Road in the context of China, Southeast Asia, and the United States. Besides his major research, Yuan is interested in media culture and queer politics.
Yuan Gao’s earlier work has appeared in Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies. He has also contributed an article to the special issue, “The Political Lives of Infrastructure” in Radical History Review. Yuan is the recipient of fellowship and grant from Center for the Humanities, Global Studies at Washington University, and East and Inner Asia Council of Association for Asian Studies. He won the Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence for 2019-20 and has taught “Literary Modernities in East Asia” (together with Prof. Rebecca Copeland), “Contemporary Chinese Popular Culture,” and offers “The Cultural Lives of the Environment in China: 1949-Present” in Fall 2023. In his spare time, he joins his friends across the world in producing podcasts about Chinese cinema and reality shows for the Chinese-speaking audiences.
