Professional Title:
Assistant Professor of English
Bio:
Dr. Gao is an Assistant Professor of English at the Department of Literatures, Languages, and Cultures at the University of California, Merced. He received his Ph.D. degree in English from the University of Florida, and a Master’s degree in Humanities and Social Thought from New York University. His specialization is queer theory, diaspora studies, twentieth and twenty-first century literature, particularly Asian Anglophone and LGBT literature.
Dr. Gao’s research is interdisciplinary in nature and brings feminist, queer, disability, affect, and performance theory to the study of literature, film and culture. Currently, he is working on his book manuscript, which focuses on the aesthetics of queer Asian diasporas. This project argues that the aesthetic engagements by diasporic subjects, particularly those negative ones deemed by the Western liberal narratives such as inscrutability, waywardness, and suspense, lay bare the problematics of white liberalism’s politics of recognition, citational practices, and its use of simple representation as the solution to the minoritarian oppressions, and in doing so, the project shows the potential of these “negative aesthetics” as a way of coping and healing from the debilitating white liberalism.
Dr. Gao’s articles appear in various academic venues. He has two forthcoming book chapters. One of them, titled "Time, Memory, and Queer Sensibility in Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting," will be published in the edited volume titled Unbound Queer Time by Routledge in 2024. The other chapter, titled "Chinatown, Little Tokyo, Koreatown, Thai Town, Filipinotown, and Asian American Writing," will be featured in the edited volume titled Los Angeles: A Literary History by Cambridge University Press in 2024. Dr. Gao has also published articles, essays, and book reviews in Critical Inquiry, Disability Studies Quarterly, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, and the Journal of Applied Communication Research. Dr. Gao coauthored his first book titled Analytical Writing Handbook, published by China Machine Press in 2019.
In the Environmental Humanities program, he teaches LGBT Fiction, Literature and Queer Ecology; and Literature and Queer Studies.
