Menglu Gao

Menglu Gao specializes in nineteenth-century British and Anglophone literature, with research interests in medical humanities, empire studies, comparative literature, environmental humanities, and critical theory. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Literature and Medicine, Studies in the Novel, Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom, George Eliot—George Henry Lewes Studies, and Routledge Handbook to Global Literature and Culture of the Romantic Period. Her current book project, Addictive Forms: Opium, Physiology, and the Stimulable Empire in the Nineteenth Century, examines how medical theories relevant to opium use and addiction provided new ways for nineteenth-century authors to conceptualize and critique imperial forms in a global society, especially in the context of Britain’s clash with the declining Chinese empire. It reveals for the first time that addiction didn’t solely serve as imperial expansion’s consequence or tool acting on individual bodies, but rather as a method of imagining the structure of empire.

Professor Gao's teaching interests include nineteenth-century British literature, world literature, empire, migration, George Eliot, literary theory, writing as technology, literature and science, critical race theory, and plant life and colonial resistance. At DU, she has offered courses on nineteenth-century outliers, epidemics and literature, nineteenth-century British literature and the empire, addiction and modernity, and introductory topics in English.