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, Routledge Handbook to Global Literature and Culture of the Romantic Period, The Palgrave Handbook of Nineteenth Century Literature and Science, and The Oxford Handbook of Literature and Science from the Nineteenth Century to the Present, among others.

Her first 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. The six-chapter Addictive Forms is based on her five-chapter dissertation, which received two international awards: 1) the 2020 Walter L. Arnstein Prize, awarded annually to one doctoral student in any discipline relevant to Victorian Studies at a U.S. or Canadian university; and 2) the Society for Global Nineteenth-Century Studies’ 2021–22 Outstanding PhD Thesis Award, a worldwide prize awarded biannually to one dissertation written in any discipline on any topic between 1750 and 1914 from comparative, global, or transregional perspectives.

Her teaching interests include nineteenth-century British literature, world literature, literature and science, empire, migration, literary theory, critical race theory, and postcolonial ecocriticism. At DU, she has offered courses on nineteenth-century outliers, George Eliot, epidemics and literature, nineteenth-century British literature and the empire, addiction and modernity, and introductory topics in English.