NCID-0900
Travis Lau
Assistant Professor of English
Kenyon College
Education/Degree:
1 English (University of Pennsylvania)
About
Travis Chi Wing Lau (he/him/his) is Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College. His research and teaching focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture, health humanities, and disability studies. Alongside his scholarship, Lau frequently writes for venues of public scholarship like Synapsis: A Journal of Health Humanities, Public Books, Lapham's Quarterly, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. His poetry has appeared in Wordgathering, Glass, South Carolina Review, Foglifter, and Hypertext, as well as in two chapbooks, The Bone Setter (Damaged Goods Press, 2019) and Paring (Finishing Line Press, 2020). [travisclau.com]
Current Work
I am particularly interested in the interrelationships between literature and medicine, as well as histories of embodiment. I am currently working on a book-length study entitled Insecure Immunity: Inoculation and Anti-Vaccination in Britain, 1720-1898, which explores the long history of inoculation insecurity, a term I use to refer to a constellation of political and cultural anxieties surrounding the legitimacy, safety, and efficacy of a developing preventative medical procedure that transformed greatly during the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This project considers how inoculation practices from earlier variolation to later vaccination were politicized through ties to national identity as defined by national health and population security.