About

Menglu Gao specializes in nineteenth-century British and Anglophone literature, with research interests in medical humanities, empire studies, comparative literature (English, Chinese, Spanish, and French), environmental humanities, and critical theory. Her articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Studies in the Novel, Literature and Medicine, 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. (Featured on the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine website) She has also begun a new project on plantation ecology in nineteenth-century and contemporary literary representations of the global South. Her research has been recognized by several North American and international awards in Victorian studies or global nineteenth-century studies, including the 2025 Vcologies Early Career Paper Prize, the Society for Global Nineteenth-Century Studies’ 2021–22 Outstanding PhD Thesis Award, and the 2020 Walter L. Arnstein Prize. She is also the recipient of research fellowships from the IU Indianapolis Arts and Humanities Institute/North American Conference on British Studies and the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, among others.

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