This fall, I will be on sabbatical for the first time in my career. In many ways, I am overwhelmed by the possibilities afforded to me by this privilege of time and space so unique to academia and one that few other professions have built into the process of promotion. Yet I remain deeply aware…
Author: Travis Chi Wing Lau
Travis Chi Wing Lau is Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College. His research and teaching focuses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture, health humanities, and disability studies. Alongside his scholarship, Lau frequently writes for venues of public scholarship like Synapsis: A Journal of Health Humanities, Public Books, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. His poetry has appeared in Barren Magazine, Wordgathering, Glass, South Carolina Review, Foglifter, and The New Engagement, as well as in two chapbooks, The Bone Setter (Damaged Goods Press, 2019) and Paring (Finishing Line Press, forthcoming). [travisclau.com]
We of the Tender Organs
Travis Chi Wing Lau// *adapted from a presentation at the Modern Language Association 2022 annual conference In the wake of the recent discourses surrounding disability fakery and the accusations that those with long COVID are faddishly embracing a new identity of self-victimization in a world that needs to “return to normal,” I have been meditating…
In memoriam.
Travis Chi Wing Lau// TW: end of life, death, dying In 2019, I wrote about my grandmother transitioning to hospice care. At the time, we feared the worst, for she had experienced a traumatic fall in her own home and was discovered unconscious hours later. After the incident, she seemed to have lost her capacity…
Notes Toward an Ethics of Editorial Care
Travis Chi Wing Lau // I have lately been prompted in multiple, unexpected ways to think about the work of editing in academia. Most recently, I shared publicly that an editor advised me to avoid publishing under my full name because it risked “confusing readers” and impacting the way my work gets cited. The editor…
Notes on Spinal Catastrophism
Travis Chi Wing Lau // “It is the duty of a spine to destroy the universe; or, a spine is the universe’s method of acknowledging this duty to self-destruct.”[1] To my scoliosis, reads the dedication to Thomas Moynihan’s Spinal Catastrophism: A Secret History (Urbanomic 2019). This line alone was more than enough for me to…
The Poetics of Chronicity (review)
Travis Chi Wing Lau // Michael J. Leach. Chronicity. Melbourne: Melbourne Poets Union, 2020. How does the temporality of chronic pain become registered in poetic form? This has long been a question that I have been pursuing in my own crip poetic project as a disabled poet living with scoliosis-related disabilities. If, per Elaine…
Against the COVID-19 Hot Take
Travis Chi Wing Lau // It is said that one of the greatest forms of academic love is when a colleague comes across a source, and they write to you to say they thought of you immediately. As someone writing about the histories of vaccine hesitancy and health insecurity, let’s just say lately I’ve been…
Field Notes from the Classroom: Interdisciplinary Teaching and Communities of Curiosity
Travis Chi Wing Lau // This morning, I had the joy of attending a workshop with the growing Science and Nature Writing initiative at Kenyon College. During this interdisciplinary conversation, we discussed different approaches to pedagogy at multiple levels of undergraduate teaching: integrating a writing component into an intermediate science course, creative writing that interwove…
On Virality, Corona or Otherwise.
Travis Chi Wing Lau // About two weeks ago, I tweeted out about a troubling experience that happened while I was riding my apartment elevator after a long day of writing and teaching. Little did I know that it would circulate so widely, that it would go viral. In the ensuing days, replies to the…
Against Medical Humanities?
Travis Chi Wing Lau // As I have wrestled with in both my review of Sari Altschuler’s The Medical Imagination and in my essays about interdisciplinarity and disciplinary difference, I remain deeply interested in the question of methodology and how we define our fields of study. Like the concept of genre, a field sets expectations:…