While on the academic job market over the past few months, I had many opportunities to define myself as a scholar. You get particularly good not only at elevator pitches—short, pithy descriptions of your intellectual interests and dissertation project—but also at sketching out your intellectual formation. My research and teaching interests have primarily been in…
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]
Frankenstein at 200: A Reflection
Frankenstein at 200 Two hundred years ago, Mary Shelley published Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, and I wanted to take the time to celebrate this occasion by thinking about my long relationship with this infinitely teachable novel. Alongside teaching this novel in a number of my courses in literature and science and the history of…
Revisiting HIV/AIDS Writing in the Age of Trump
Travis Chi Wing Lau // “It will be recorded that the dead in the first decade of the calamity died of our indifference.” —Paul Monette At the end of the past year, the Trump administration dismissed all sixteen members of the federal HIV/AIDS advisory council, a panel that has existed since the Reagan years. This…
Disorientations: On Disability in Graduate School
Travis Chi Wing Lau // Sara Ahmed, in Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (2006), asks what it means to be orientated. By thinking through sexuality in terms of lived, embodied experience, Ahmed challenges us to think about how queer bodies occupy space and time. She writes that “if orientation is a matter of how we…
The Anti-Disability of Anti-Vaccination
Travis Chi Wing Lau // During my final year of undergraduate studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, I was studying at a café and had with me Seth Mnookin’s controversial new book, The Panic Virus.[1] While I was reading, I was approached by a woman who happened to be waiting for her order…
Revaluing Illness: Virginia Woolf’s “On Being Ill”
Travis Chi Wing Lau // Recently republished by Paris Press, Virginia Woolf’s meditation from the sickbed first appeared in T.S. Eliot’s The Criterion in January 1926. In this short reflection, I want to consider how Woolf offers us an early model for a patient-centered narrative medicine that challenges reductive assumptions about sickness as a state…