Yuan Gao joins EALC in fall 2024.
Yuan Gao, known as Kevin by friends and colleagues, specializes in the cultural politics of technology in modern and contemporary China. His interdisciplinary research spans literature, film and media, environmental humanities, and queer studies from the early 20th century to the present. He earned his PhD from Washington University in St. Louis in 2024 with a dissertation entitled "Corporeal Technology: Hydraulic Infrastructure and the Culture of Labor in China, 1952-1993." Built on the dissertation, his current research connects infrastructure studies and cultural studies to examine water management labor and cultural production from China's high socialist era to the early Opening and Reform. Placing Chinese mass politics in the context of environmental governance, this book project reveals how the revolutionary masses were organized, trained, and imagined as human resources for the infrastructural construction of the Cold War PRC.
Besides the book manuscript, he is working on two projects: the politics of sensation of the Burma Road during World War II and the employment of "old" and "new" documentary devices in the recent queer expressions. His other research and teaching interests include media and popular culture, queer culture and its intervention in existing familial relationships, and dissemination of material technologies and borderland imagination.
At Washington University, he has taught Chinese environmental culture, contemporary popular culture, and literatures of diaspora and migration. Part of his research has been published in Radical History Review (Special Issue: The Political Lives of Infrastructure). Prior to joining the faculty in the Department of East Asian Languages and Culture, he was a fellow at Center for the Humanities.
