Wan-Chuan Kao

Wan-Chuan Kao (he/him) is Associate Professor of English and Head of the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program at Washington and Lee University. Wan-Chuan works on the late Middle Ages and its resonances in the contemporary world across Western and non-Western milieus. His research and teaching are grounded in his commitment to rigorous theorization and historicization: the unflinching pursuit of aesthetic responses, critical intuitions, close investigations, and transformative perspectives. His first monograph, White before Whiteness in the Late Middle Ages (Manchester University Press, 2024), examines late medieval representations of whiteness across bodily and non-somatic figurations.

While at the Newhouse Center, Wan-Chuan will work on his second monograph, Chaucer’s Queer Logistics, which considers three critical premodern socio-cultural contexts within The Canterbury Tales: the circulation of gendered bodies under reproductive capitalism; care work as logistical management within the heteronormative household; and affective transfer vis-à-vis bodily and textual movement. Situated at the nexus of logistics, literature, and gender and sexuality, Chaucer’s Queer Logistics draws upon a wide range of materials, both historical and theoretical, in order to offer an innovative understanding of the late Middle Ages as a crucial transition period when proto-logistical capitalism emerged in the West. It argues that the body made logistical constitutes a form of sexuality and gender beyond cisheteronormativity; queer logistics encroaches upon the household, in which gendered care work is indistinguishable from logistical management; and affect is a mechanism of queer logistics, yet the temporality of affective motion does not align with that of narrative movement.