Introducing qUCL's new co-director

qUCL is a university-wide initiative that brings together UCL staff and students with research and teaching interests in LGBTQ studies, gender and sexuality studies, queer theory and related fields.

Dr Simon Lock has been a director at qUCL since September 2018; he is very pleased to have Dr Xine Yao join him from this month, and together they have exciting plans to grow and develop the network further.

As co-director, Xine is particularly interested in fostering feminist, queer, and trans of colour critique, and looks forward to supporting and growing the vibrancy of the qUCL network in the diversity of its research and, foremost, the people and the wider community. 

Xine’s primary research focuses on early and nineteenth-century American literature through affect theory, critical race and ethnic studies, and feminist and queer of colour theory. Her book Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America (2021) won the Duke University Press Scholars of Colour First Book Prize.