Wan-Chuan Kao, associate professor of English and head of the Medieval and Renaissance Studies program at Washington and Lee Universit y, has received a fellowship to Wellesley College’s Suzy Newhouse Center for the Humanities for the 2026-27 academic year.
The fellowship provides a stipend of $60,000, private office space, research support, technical and computing resources and the collegiality offered through the center and the Wellesley community at large.
Kao, who is on sabbatical in the upcoming 2026-27 school year, is one of four external fellows, alongside select members of the Wellesley College faculty, chosen to participate this academic year. While there, Kao will be working on his monograph project “Chaucer’s Queer Logistics.”
Kao said he’s “honored” and “excited” to be “part of the vibrant community of scholars” at Wellesley. “Unlike a large research community, Wellesley is a small liberal arts college that emphasizes scholarship, teaching and community. It is an intellectual environment, grounded in the humanities, that is similar to W&L, and I look forward to conducting research and bringing back to W&L what I will have learned during the fellowship. I am grateful for the support of provost Lena Hill, dean Paul Youngman, the Advisory Committee, the Lenfest Sabbatical Fellowship, professor Holly Pickett, as well as the English Department, MRST and the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies program.”
Kao’s monograph will examine the intersection of logistics, literature, gender and sexuality, exploring how logistical experience shapes and is shaped by bodies and identities. The project focuses on the crucial transitional period of the late Middle Ages when early forms of logistical capitalism emerged in the West and supply line technology began to influence the modern human condition.
“Analyzing the work of Geoffrey Chaucer, my project contributes new insights to research on medieval gender and sexuality, to our understanding of Chaucer as a logistically situated author at the cusp of modernity and to current notions of what ‘The Canterbury Tales’ is attempting to do,” he said.
Kao is a scholar of the late Middle Ages and its resonances in the contemporary world across Western and non-Western milieus. His research and teaching interests include late medieval British literature, whiteness studies, critical race studies, gender and sexuality, queer studies and critical theory. He is the author of “White before Whiteness in the Late Middle Ages,” and, in addition to his current monograph, he is also working on another, titled “Holding the Premodern.”
Kao has been a member of the W&L faculty since 2013. He holds a bachelor of arts and master of arts from Hunter College and a master of philosophy and a doctoratefrom the City University of New York Graduate Center.
