Dr. Gao is an Assistant Professor of English at the Department of Literatures, Languages, and Cultures at the University of California, Merced. He received his Ph.D. degree in English from the University of Florida, and a Master’s degree in Humanities and Social Thought from New York University. His specialization is queer theory, queer ecology, environmental humanities, diaspora, queer literature and films.
Currently, Dr. Gao is working on his book manuscript tentatively titled Disintegration: A Queer Aesthetic for the Planetary Future, which seeks to formulate disintegration as a queer ecological analytic, using it to examine contemporary queer literature, films and arts. Disintegration as an analytic facilitates a dialectical synthesis of queer theory and ecology. Not only are discourses of failure, destabilization, and even death shared concerns in these fields, but disintegration brings attention to the solid material grounding of remnant social and ecological relations – that which modern society finds illegible or insignificant. This book project draws attention to the dispossession of minorities and the exploitation of nature, the modern processes that engender these joined oppressions, and the world-making projects taking place at their nexus.
Dr. Gao’s articles appear in various academic venues. He has two forthcoming book chapters. One of them, titled "Time, Memory, and Queer Sensibility in Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting," will be published in the edited volume titled Unbound Queer Time by Routledge in 2024. The other chapter, titled "Chinatown, Little Tokyo, Koreatown, Thai Town, Filipinotown, and Asian American Writing," will be featured in the edited volume titled Los Angeles: A Literary History by Cambridge University Press. Dr. Gao has also published articles, essays, and book reviews in Critical Inquiry, Disability Studies Quarterly, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, and the Journal of Applied Communication Research.
Dr. Gao coauthored the book titled Unpacking the Logics of GRE Writing: An Analytical Writing Handbook, which was published by China Machine Press in 2019.
Courses Professor Gao teaches at UC Merced: ENG 010: Foundations of Literary Studies; ENG 055 Introduction to Short Stories; ENG 062: Literature and Gender; ENG 063: Twentieth-Century Women Writers; ENG 064: LGBT Fiction; ENG 129: Asian American Literature; ENG 129: Literature and Emotion; ENG 129: Global Women Writers; ENG 183: Literature and Queer Ecology; ENG 184: Literature and Queer Studies; ENG 190 Senior Thesis.