Travis Chi Wing Lau joined the Kenyon faculty in 2020 as an assistant professor of English and currently serves as this year’s director of the English Senior Honors program. He is both a scholar and a practicing poet, with his academic expertise ranging from 18th- and 19-century British literature and culture to health humanities and disability studies.
Besides Gambier, where is your favorite place in the world to be?
It is really special for me to be able to share that I have a home now. Being at Kenyon has given me the security to lay down roots, so I believe my best response would be to say it’s the home that my partner and I share. It’s been a long process of feeling like we’ve landed on our feet and can be a part of a community, so it’s really meaningful for us to have a space that is fully our own.
Why did you come to Kenyon?
Kenyon is one of those really fantastic places that really embraces the fact that I am both a scholar and a creative. In all of the institutions that I have worked at prior to this, I have always felt this need to pick between them. I was trained as a person in literary studies who does literary history, so I always felt like that had to be my main job. At Kenyon, I’m allowed to do both — I’m invited to do both.
I am teaching a “Disability Poetry and Poetics” course this semester, which at other institutions would be solely in the purview of the creative writing faculty, but my expertise as a practicing poet is something that is appreciated here. It means a lot to me to end up at an institution where I don’t have to make a choice.
Fill in the blank: My experience at Kenyon would not be the same without ______.
The close and vulnerable relationships I have been able to form with my students. I’ve always been at large institutions prior to this, where you have a large undergraduate body of 20,000 to 30,000 students. You’re just not having the kinds of relationships with students you might not otherwise have. I think this is also a byproduct of our small classes where you get to know everyone quite well.
What is your favorite Kenyon tradition?
I am a real sucker for those occasions where you get to mark, in a ceremonial way, a milestone in someone’s educational career. I really love convocation and graduation as moments where, first of all, faculty are in regalia and we get to see the fact that our faculty come from all over, and that we see students at the very beginning of their careers. I know this will always bookend my year.
What Kenyon class would you love to take — again or for the first time?
I am already doing my dream class that I’m teaching for the first time which is “English 291: Disability Poetry & Poetics.” I think I arrived at Kenyon at a really interesting moment where there are a lot of us who do disability studies, so I am thrilled to be able to teach the living poets who are my peers and friends, but then also spotlight a field that is relatively young and not as well known. Maybe in the future I could team-teach a class on vaccination with one of the bio folks and do a cultural and STEM review of the history of immunobiology and vaccination.
If there was a soundtrack to your Kenyon experience, what song would be on repeat?
My partner and I have come to associate Kenyon with the band Boygenius. It only became more apparent to us that we were right when we went to a festival Boygenius was at in Columbus and we saw several Kenyonites. “Letter To An Old Poet” seems apropos.
Where do you find satisfaction outside of your work?
Outside of my academic work, I really enjoy doing other tactile art forms. One of the things that I really enjoy doing is charcoal portraits. I am a poet and that is the primary way that I do my creative expression, but I have been trying to be more in my body, as someone who has a very complex relationship with it. One of the things that I have found soothing and therapeutic has been to work with charcoal.
It’s such a strange medium. It requires you to use your fingers, really touching the surfaces. It’s also a very unwieldy and difficult form to control because once you smudge it, it’s smudged … but I’ve come to love it. These other forms of creative expression have been very important to me — the ones that involve using my hands.
What is something interesting that you have read recently?
I completed a series of speculative fiction by the writer Ann Leckie called the “Imperial Radch” trilogy. It’s essentially about a sentient AI and their relationship with empire. It’s one of the most unsettling but also generative and thought-provoking forms of science fiction I’ve read in a long time because it deals with these really large questions of imperialism, colonialism and identity via AI.
What new skill would you like to learn?
I am a deep lover of food. Food has always been a love language of mine. Much of how I grew up and my culture involve taste and food. I would love to learn how to cook and cook properly. I describe myself as a “functional cook,” as in my mom taught me just enough to take care of myself, but so much of the flavors and recipes that I really adore are the things you actually need skill to be able to do. In a fantasy world, I would have loved to go to culinary school, but unfortunately that is not a life path I can take.
What is the best piece of advice that you've ever been given?
I was the baccalaureate speaker a few years ago and the piece of advice I shared then still remains the best piece of advice I can relay: to embrace doubt and uncertainty. I was talking then about the idea that as college students, you have to have your whole lives figured out. You’re supposed to apply to things with the certainty that you want to do them, but what does it really mean to embrace the fact that life is uncertain? That the paths we pursue might not ultimately be the paths we find best for ourselves. It’s still a lesson that I still haven’t fully learned, but one that I think is so important.
The Kenyon Ten is an occasional question-and-answer feature that highlights students, faculty and staff.