Wan-Chuan Kao

Wan-Chuan Kao 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 book, White before Whiteness in the Late Middle Ages (Manchester University Press, 2024), examines premodern figurations of whiteness both bodily and non-somatic. This project was supported by fellowships from the Folger Institute, the North American Conference on British Studies, and the Lenfest Grants.

Kao is currently working on two projects: first, Chaucer’s Queer Logistics, explores how late medieval systems of flows and movements bring affective and discursive pressures to bear on the infrastructure of gender, sexuality, and desire in Chaucer’s work; and second, Holding the Premodern, rethinks the figure of the hold in premodernity alongside the historiography of racial capitalism.

Education

• Ph.D., The Graduate Center, CUNY
• M. Phil., The Graduate Center, CUNY
• M.A., Hunter College, CUNY
• B.A., Hunter College, CUNY

Research

Medieval literature, especially Chaucer; whiteness studies; critical theory; race and ethnicity; gender and sexuality; queer studies; hotel theory; affect; and aesthetics.

Teaching

• ENGL 4903 Honors Thesis 
• ENGL 4103 Senior Research and Writing 
• ENGL 3935 Body and Flesh in the Age of Chaucer 
• ENGL 3891 Hotel Orient 
• ENGL 3331 Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales 
• ENGL 3328 Arthurian Bodies, Desires, and Affects 
• ENGL 3321 Gender, Love, and Marriage in the Middle Ages 
• ENGL 3200 Literary Theory 
• ENGL 2909 Seminar for Prospective Majors 
• ENGL/WGSS 2877 The Body Electric: Queer Theory, Film, and Text 
• ENGL 2831 Literary Approaches to Poverty 
• ENGL/FILM 2327 Cinema Arthuriana 
• ENGL 2325 Arthurian Legend 
• ENGL 2320 British Literature: Medieval and Early Modern 
• MRST 1100 Medieval and Renaissance Culture 
• First-Year Seminar The Good Wife 

Seminar and Capstone Topics

• Color, Race, Gender, and Faith
• The Good Wife
• The (M.) Butterfly Effect
• Masculinity and Monstrosity
• Medieval Poverty and Labor
• Premodern REM: Dreaming in the Middle Ages
• Queering the Text
• Trans*ing the Text
• Spatializing the Text

Selected Publications

Monograph

• White before Whiteness in the Late Middle Ages
  (Manchester University Press, January 2024)

My monograph argues firstly that while whiteness participates crucially in the history of racialization in late medieval West, it does not denote or connote skin tone alone; secondly, that the “before” of whiteness is less a retro-futuristic temporization than a discursive figuration of how white becomes whiteness; and thirdly, that premodern whiteness is fragile, precarious, and racialistic.

Podcast Interview on the New Books Network
Featured on Throughlines.org (Race in the Premodern Classroom) 

Articles

• “Leather Incarnate: Medieval, American.” Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History, 17 (2025): 62-80.

• “Globalising Whiteness: Transmission, Idolatry, and Fetishism.” Medieval Travel Writing: A Global History. Ed. Sebastian Sobecki. Cambridge University Press, 2025. 104-26.

• “Barred Fragility.” Reconsidering the Subject. Special colloquium. Ed. Holly Crocker. Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 46 (2024): 249-60.

• “Logistics, Cultural Capital, and the Psychic Zone of Contamination.”Colloquium: The Time of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Ruth Evans and R. D. Ryan. New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession, 5.1 (2024): 120-29.

• “Queer Theory and Late Medieval England.”High and Late Medieval English. Ed. Rory Critten. Literary Encyclopedia, 2023.

• “Shamanizing Matters.” Premodern New Materialism forum. Ed. Tekla Bude and Adin Lears. Exemplaria: Medieval, Early Modern, Theory, 35.2 (2023): 116-23.

• “Race.” The Routledge Companion to Medieval English Literature. Ed. Raluca Radulescu and Sif Ríkharðsdóttir. Routledge, 2023. 394-403.

• “The World Is an Inn.” Teaching the Global Middle Ages. Ed. Geraldine Heng. The PMLA Options for Teaching series. Modern Language Association, 2022. 289-301.

• “In the Lap of Whiteness.” Race and Periodization. Special issue of New Literary History, 52.3/4 (2021): 535-61.

• “The Fragile Giant.” Arthuriana, 31.2 (2021): 9-39.

• “Identitarian Politics, Precarious Sovereignty.” Race, Revulsion, and Revolution. Special issue of postmedieval, 11.4 (2020): 371-83.

• “Precarious Figures, Rigorous Styles.” Special issue: The Way We Do Theory Now. Exemplaria: Medieval, Early Modern, Theory, 31.2 (2019): 105-16.

• “The Body in Wonder: Affective Suspension and Medieval Queer Futurity.” Affect Theory and Literary Critical Practice: A Feel for the Text. Ed. Stephen Ahern. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 25-43.

• "Cute Chaucer." Exemplaria: Medieval, Early Modern, Theory, 32.2 (2018): 147-71.

• “Post by a Thousand Cuts.” Going Postcard: The Letter(s) of Jacques Derrida. Ed. Vincent W. J. van Gerven Oei. New York: Punctum Books, 2017. 69-81.

• “Memorialization in White: Chaucerian Topology and the Defaute of Subjectivity.” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, 4.3 (2013): 352–363.

• “Conduct Shameful and Unshameful in the Franklin’s Tale.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 34 (2012): 99-139. 

• “Hotel Tartary: Marco Polo, Yams, and the Biopolitics of Population.” Mediaevalia, 32 (2011): 43-68. 

• “The Tomboyism of Faith: Spiritual Tomboyism in the Cult of Sainte Foy.” Journal of Lesbian Studies, 15.4 (2011): 412-49.

Edited Collection of Essays

• The Retro-Futurism of Cuteness (Punctum Books, 2017)
  Co-editor: Jen Boyle (Coastal Carolina University)

Web-Based Publications

• "Facial Misrecognition."The Collation (blog), The Folger Institute, May 11, 2021.
  
  
• “White Attunement.” The New Chaucer Society (blog), Nov 9, 2018. Peer-reviewed.
  
  
• “#palefacesmatter?” In the Middle (blog), July 26, 2016.

Reviews

• Rosanne P. Gasse. Hybridity in the Literature of Medieval England. The Medieval Review. 7 March 2025. Web.
  
  
• Tison Pugh. Chaucer’s (Anti-)Eroticisms and the Queer Middle Ages. Studies in the Age of Chaucer 37 (2015):307-11.
  
  
• Carolyn Dinshaw. How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time. Medium Ævum 83.2 (2014): 319-20.
  
  
• William Burgwinkle and Cary Howie. Sanctity and Pornography in Medieval Culture: On the Verge. Medium Ævum 80.2 (2011): 347-48.
  
  
• Holly A. Crocker. Chaucer’s Visions of Manhood. The Medieval Review. 7 May 2011. Web.
  
  
• Heather Love. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Women’s Studies Quarterly 36.3&4 (2008): 327-29.