Andrew Chang

My research explores how 19th-Century British literature operated as a technology of governance amidst the construction and fortification of the British Empire. Supplemented by contemporary postcolonial and queer theory, I critically examine how imperial control over sexuality, ethnicity, race, and nationality is enacted through the literature of the era, with a particular focus on how such literature categorizes different bodies with regards to their use value in the imperial mission. Much of my work centres on portrayals of queer or foreign bodies in literary texts around the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and the Opium Wars of 1839 and 1856, by authors such as Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Thomas De Quincey, and Oscar Wilde.