About

Priscilla Wald is the R. Florence Brinkley Distinguished Professor of English at Duke University, where she teaches and conducts research on U.S. literature and culture, particularly from the late-18th to mid-20th centuries. Her scholarly work focuses on contemporary narratives of science and medicine, science fiction literature and film, law and literature, and environmental studies. Wald's recent work explores the intersections among law, literature, science, and medicine, with her last book-length study, 'Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative,' examining the intersection of medicine and myth in the concept of contagion and the stories told about emerging infections. She is also the author of 'Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form' and co-editor of 'The American Novel, 1870-1940.' Currently, she is working on a book titled 'Human Being After Genocide,' which investigates the challenges to concepts of human identity arising from scientific and technological innovations following World War II, decolonization, and geopolitical transformations. Wald's research tracks how mythic histories, science fiction, and debates around biotechnology influence cultural beliefs and values, especially through the circulation of scientific information in media and popular culture. She is committed to fostering interdisciplinary conversations among scholars in science, medicine, law, and cultural studies to deepen understanding of how language, images, and stories shape lived experiences.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Genetics
• Law
• Media studies
• Gender studies
• Criminology
• Art history
• Geography
• Computational biology
• History
• Biology

Selected publications

• Pandemics and the Lesson of History

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024-05-09

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  A long tradition of pandemic – or plague – literature, dating back at least as far as classical Greece, has used catastrophic communicable disease as a backdrop to explore the human condition: what it means to live in a community of other humans, and, as awareness of the crises of environmental devastation and climate change grows, on a planet with other living organisms. In different ways, and with differing resolutions, twentieth- and twenty-first-century works of pandemic fiction show how pandemics stem not only from human practices, but also from the values, beliefs, and stories about the past – the histories – in which they are rooted. Whether dystopic or utopic, apocalyptic or contained, literary pandemics warn that in order to change the way humans collectively inhabit the world, we need to change the dominant stories we tell about it.

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• The Cambridge Companion to American Utopian Literature and Culture since 1945

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024-05-09 · 3 citations

  book

  Providing a comprehensive overview of American thought in the period following World War II, after which the US became a global military and economic leader, this book explores the origins of American utopianism and provides a trenchant critique from the point of view of those left out of the hegemonic ideal. Centring the voices of those oppressed by or omitted from the consumerist American Dream, this book celebrates alternative ways of thinking about how to create a better world through daily practices of generosity, justice, and care. The chapters collected here emphasize utopianism as a practice of social transformation, not as a literary genre depicting a putatively perfect society, and urgently make the case for why we need utopian thought today. With chapters on climate change, economic justice, technology, and more, alongside chapters exploring utopian traditions outside Western frameworks, this book opens a new discussion in utopian thought and theory.

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• Acknowledgments

  Duke University Press eBooks · 2023

  • Geography

  Elizabeth Ault, was every thing: patient when I needed it but also mindful of timing (and the paper shortages of the pandemic supply chain!);I'm especially

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• Introduction

  New York University Press eBooks · 2023-09-07

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Afterword

  English Language Notes · 2023-04-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, I found myself returning in my thinking, reading, writing, and teaching to the classical understanding of plagues as messages from the gods that something was out of order in the social world. The pandemic has highlighted many aspects of the social world in the United States (and elsewhere) that are out of order, including structural racism, socioeconomic inequities, climate change and environmental devastation, and inadequate and unjust health-care systems. The authors of these essays, of course, did not need a global pandemic to spotlight those concerns, but the pandemic has made clear the imperative to address them and has forced us, through necessary adaptations, to take the time to think differently about our habitual practices in our work as scholars and teachers of literature and culture.The word crisis has its origin in medical terminology—from medieval Latin, by way of Greek krisis, “decision”—a turning point in the illness in which the patient either recovers or dies. The pandemic has been a crisis of crises. Even as it has brought each of the social, economic, and environmental crises more sharply into view, it is itself a kaleidoscopic expression of their consequences. Each of those crises is a contributing factor in turning an outbreak into a global pandemic. The conversation in which these essays are collectively engaging is one I have been hearing informally as SARS-CoV-2 has circulated among us: What can we contribute specifically as professors of literature and culture through our scholarship and our pedagogy? And what have we learned through this experience that might change our practices both on the page and in the classroom?While those are standard questions that surface routinely in our circles, the pandemic, as these essays suggest, has brought them into focus with a stark clarity reminiscent of what Walter Benjamin describes, in his lyrical meditation “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” as memories flashing up “at a moment of danger.”1 The intensified insight that has surfaced with the pandemic has shown the need for institutional change, from the governance structure of the university (as in Michael Bérubé’s essay) to the habitual practices in our classrooms. Note, for example, Barbara Fuchs’s description of one of the most sobering moments in [her] research [that] came when [she] realized that the questions of form and genre that preoccupy a critic were in this case literally matters of life and death: as the unions argued over whether streamed theater counted as theater or film, the health insurance of hundreds of artists hung in the balance, given that they needed to work for a certain number of weeks per year in their respective modes to qualify for the benefits that Equity and the Screen Actors Guild provided exclusively to those working on their own turf.Each of the crises addressed in these essays is a Benjaminian “moment of danger,” as, of course, is the pandemic. “In the midst of an era when an older social order is crumbling and a new one is struggling to define itself,” Henry A. Giroux points out, “there emerges a time of confusion, danger, and great restlessness. The present moment is once again at a historical juncture in which the structures of liberation and authoritarianism are vying to shape a future that appears to be either an unthinkable nightmare or a realizable dream.”The danger of such moments for Benjamin works in both directions. The insight of the flashing memory poses a threat to the power structure that maintains its hold by obscuring the structural nature of its power. But it is a fleeting insight, with forces aligned to maintain the obscurity: “In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it.”2 I am concerned when I hear the wish echoing all around me that we “go back to normal.” That wish is the siren song of the comforts of habit, and it is especially strong for those privileged enough for the norms to seem comfortable. As these essays make clear, “normal” is what got us here, and the challenge now is to move forward through change and not to “go back to normal,” however tempting that may sound.Andrew Gilbert concludes his essay with a lesson learned when a board game—Pandemic—suddenly became all too real: “Perhaps a study of both real and imagined/virtual play will illuminate the truth in the other—the lifelike quality of games and the game-like qualities of life.” An essay I found myself coming back to throughout the pandemic made a similar prediction two decades prior to the declaration of COVID-19 as a global pandemic. In a piece published in Science in 2000, “Infectious History,” the Nobel laureate microbiologist Joshua Lederberg predicted, “The future of humanity and microbes likely will unfold as episodes of a suspense thriller that could be titled Our Wits Versus Their Genes.”3 As the pandemic unfolded, I found myself musing, like Giroux, that we were characters in that “dystopian novel,” but just as Gilbert stresses his role as the player as well as a character within the board game, we need to remember that humans are the authors of Lederberg’s thriller as well as characters within it. Of course, the authorship is disproportionate, with responsibility and risk distributed largely in inverse proportions. But it is imperative to recognize a pandemic as the result of human actions and neither the language of the gods nor the result entirely of chance.In a formulation I have echoed in my work throughout the pandemic, Lederberg contends that while “new strategies and tactics for countering pathogens will be uncovered by finding and exploiting innovations that evolved within other species, . . . our most sophisticated leap would be to drop the manichaean view of microbes—‘We good; they evil.’” Such attribution, he explains, overlooks the relationship humans have with our beneficial microbes and the immunological strategies with which we could more productively prevent or at least mitigate the effects of outbreaks. It also obscures the role of humans in creating the conditions that produce them. “Perhaps,” he continues, “one of the most important changes we can make is to supercede [sic] the 20th-century metaphor of war for describing the relationship between people and infectious agents. A more ecologically informed metaphor, which includes the germs’-eye view of infection, might be more fruitful.”4Lederberg’s suggestion is a lesson worth taking to heart with regard not only to pandemics but also, more broadly, to climate change and the many other environmental crises we face. It is, for that matter, well worth considering why the war metaphor is so proliferative with regard to all these crises rather than the ecological metaphors of interdependence and cooperation. The point is that language matters; how we talk about something both reflects and influences our understanding of it. And that is surely a lesson literary and cultural critics are well positioned to teach. The essays in this special issue are very much in the spirit of Lederberg’s contention. Like Gilbert’s observation that a board game can offer insight into the structures of power in our world and, in the process, teach us strategies we need to address a real-world problem, Lederberg reminds us that we inhabit and experience our world through the stories we tell about it, but those stories are subject to change.The germs’-eye view puts the interconnectedness of our environment on display. It shows us where the vulnerabilities are: how microbes exploit the inequities of our world, taking root in the susceptibilities among populations created by socioeconomic inequities and inadequate health-care systems—as Lennard J. Davis and Jerry Zee illustrate with such clear and poignant force in their essays—and hitchhiking on the rapid transportation systems that circulate goods and people in our global economy. A germs’-eye view puts on display the consequences and priorities of the privileged and empowered within a global system. Lederberg is speaking the language of the humanities and social sciences as well as the sciences when he shows how we might change our vocabulary and our stories in order to change our perspectives, hence our world.The essays in this special issue meditate on some of the changes literary and cultural critics can make in our scholarship and pedagogy. As Christina Katopodis notes at the beginning of her essay, drawing on Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, “We have an astounding opportunity for change in the wake of a crisis: we can turn from the banking model of the past [students’ passively taking in faculty expertise] to an ecological one, adopt a habitable pedagogy that teaches students how to live in a rapidly evolving world and solve its problems to make our planet habitable for future generations.” We—literary and cultural critics—can, that is, teach them that humans know the world through language and stories; we can teach them to recognize where those stories come from; and we can work together to consider how we might change them, as Kelly L. Bezio describes in her essay on the relevance of a mid-nineteenth-century work, Our Nig, for the contemporary moment. I have found that our students have numerous ideas about the world in which they want to live and refreshingly original ideas about how to get there. Benjamin offers an important reminder, however, of how difficult such changes are to make—the temptation to fall back into conformity—hence our need for vigilance: to work, as these essays advocate, against the enticement of a “return to normal,” especially in the areas we can control, our classrooms, our scholarship, and, as Bérubé insists, the faculty governance of our institutions.There is a particular crisis I have not mentioned. The “crisis in the humanities,” which was getting considerable airtime prior to the pandemic, may seem less urgent in light of the other crises I have outlined. After all, declining enrollments and a precipitous drop in majors surely pales in comparison to a raging pandemic, a continuing recession, gun violence, climate change, resource exhaustion, catastrophic weather events, and an increase in the hovering threat of fascism across the globe. The steep decline in enrollments and majors that precipitated the most recent declaration of a crisis in the humanities coincided with the 2008 economic downturn and the widely articulated concern that a humanities major was not “useful” for job prospects in a declining job market. In retrospect, I find myself wondering where that narrative began and whom it serves. Surely if what we teach were really irrelevant, we would not see concerted efforts to supervise and censor our classrooms; surely critical race theory and gender, sexuality, queer, and trans studies would not provoke the anger and anxiety to which these concerted efforts bear witness.Both Lederberg’s piece and the essays in this special issue make clear how the work literary and cultural critics do in our scholarship, our classrooms, and our institutions is intricately connected to the strategies of power that structure the world. Literary and cultural studies offer students the tools to think about how language, images, and stories shape lived experiences. They provide an opportunity to examine individual and collective beliefs, to challenge the status quo and perhaps to think otherwise. The changes we have had to make in our various pedagogies since the onset of the pandemic were often difficult and frustrating, but they have thrown into relief many of the conventions of our fields and institutions and of what we communicate through our habitual practices in our classrooms, our assignments, and our modes of assessment. This unsettling applies as well to the scholarly and evaluative conventions of our fields and institutions. These essays remind us that every “crisis” is a turning point and that a turning point is also an opportunity for change. Perhaps that is one of the important insights that has surfaced with the flash of memory in this moment of danger on which these essays have seized along with their urgent appeal, implicit and explicit, not to “return to normal.”

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• Keywords for Health Humanities

  New York University Press eBooks · 2023-08-28 · 4 citations

  bookSenior author

  Introduces key concepts and debates in health humanities and the health professions. Keywords for Health Humanities provides a rich, interdisciplinary vocabulary for the burgeoning field of health humanities and, more broadly, for the study of medicine and health. Sixty-five entries by leading international scholars examine current practices, ideas, histories, and debates around health and illness, revealing the social, cultural, and political factors that structure health conditions and shape health outcomes. Presenting possibilities for health justice and social change, this volume exposes readers—from curious beginners to cultural analysts, from medical students to health care practitioners of all fields—to lively debates about the complexities of health and illness and their ethical and political implications. A study of the vocabulary that comprises and shapes a broad understanding of health and the practices of healthcare, Keywords for Health Humanities guides readers toward ways to communicate accurately and effectively while engaging in creative analytical thinking about health and healthcare in an increasingly complex world—one in which seemingly straightforward beliefs and decisions about individual and communal health represent increasingly contested terrain.

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• 35 Pandemics and the Politics of Planetary Health

  Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2022-08-26

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• Resilience . . .

  Resilience A Journal of the Environmental Humanities · 2022-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Resilience . . . Priscilla Wald (bio) From re (back) and salire (to jump, leap), “the act of rebounding or springing back; rebound, recoil”—The Oxford English Dictionary sets the first usage of resilience in the seventeenth century and in the nineteenth adds “elasticity; the power of resuming the original shape or position after compression, bending, etc.” Less common usages include: “revolt, recoil from something,” and “repugnance, antagonism.” Although largely fallen out of usage, the less common meanings make sense: to leap back suggests an act of recovery, but also of repugnance; we leap back in disgust. The richness of the word with all of its meanings captures the ambivalence the West in particular has expressed toward the organic world throughout recorded history. It may offer a way to think forward in what Martin Luther King calls “the urgency of now” (1963). The tenth anniversary of Resilience, coinciding as it does with a time of breathtaking (or perhaps breathless) uncertainty, seems an opportune moment to contemplate—and reclaim—the full meaning of the word. Human history offers a record of that ambivalence. Ancient myths manifest what the early-twentieth-century theologian Rudolf Otto calls the numinous, “the hushed, trembling, speechless humility of the creature in the presence of . . . that which is a mystery inexpressible and above all creatures” (Otto, 1958, 13)—the irrational and unpredictable world at once bountiful and sustaining and terrible in its destruction. Food sources drown in floods and dry up in droughts; shelters give way to earthquakes or tornadoes. In classical times the gods spoke through weather events, rewarding and punishing accordingly. Charles Darwin’s Nature likewise presides over a world equally brutal and magical. He writes, “[T]he face of nature bright with gladness” [End Page 119] masks the harsh reality of survival, how “the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life” and how “these songsters, or their eggs, or their nestlings, are destroyed by birds and beasts of prey . . .” (Darwin 62). Conversely, this zero-sum game makes us forget the mutual sustenance of life, how “plants and animals, most remote in the scale of nature, are bound together by a web of complex relations,” how “cattle absolutely determine the existence of the Scotch fir” and “insects determine the existence of cattle” (Darwin 72). In many ways, the lessons of science hearkened to as they updated the lessons of the classical world: the weather alternately punishing human-kind for their transgressions or showing its favor through blessings. For Darwin’s contemporary the American diplomat and philologist turned amateur Naturalist George Perkins Marsh, inspired, as Darwin was, by the German philosopher-scientist Alexander von Humboldt, the desiccated landscape of humanity’s earliest settlements bore witness to a war of human aggression. “[W]e are, even now, breaking up the floor and wainscoting and doors and window frames of our dwelling for fuel to warm our bodies and seethe our pottage,” he warned, “and the world cannot afford to wait till the slow and sure progress of exact science has taught it a better economy” (Marsh [1864] 2003, 52). The floods, winds, and fires, the trembling ground and raging winds that inspire Otto’s terrible awe are, for Marsh, expressions of a merited vengeance and disdain: forces unleashed against careless and even wanton human usage and ill-conceived human encroachments. Sometimes, in more docile moments, Nature “mocks the cunning and power of man by spontaneously performing, for his benefit, works which he shrinks from undertaking, and the execution of which by him she would resist with unconquerable obstinacy,” as in her “fettering” the encroaching dunes or “guard[ing] well the chains by which she connects promontories with mainlands, and binds continents together” (Marsh [1864] 2003, 438). Not as inscrutable as a god, perhaps, but just as unpredictable. Looking back, Sigmund Freud would label mid-nineteenth-century evolutionism the second of “three severe blows from the researches of science” to “the universal narcissism of men, their self-love” (Freud, 139). Maybe it was the idea of descent from slime dwellers rather than the more Romantic expulsion from a Garden that made the earth seem like a prison. Or maybe...

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• Microbes of Empire

  American Quarterly · 2022-09-01 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Microbes of Empire Priscilla Wald (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Anti-Asian hate crimes rose dramatically during the pandemic. This poster appeared in the New York subway in February 2021. Credit: STAR MAX file photo via AP. [End Page 706] In memory of Amy Kaplan We are living in a moment in which the natural world and the social world are manifesting dramatic chaos, beset with reminders of the precarity of human existence in the form of pandemics, climate catastrophes, and seemingly endless examples of structural racism. In the ancient world, plague spoke in the language of the gods: it was the natural—which is to say divine—world's way of manifesting a rupture in the social order. The ancients' understanding of the connection between these worlds has been severed over time, but perhaps the contemporary moment can return us to that sacred insight. Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the world has witnessed a proliferation of devastating climate disasters in the form of record-setting temperatures, especially heat waves, and accompanying droughts, fires, hurricanes, cyclones, tornados, monsoons, and landslides. Glaciers are melting, and air and water are becoming increasingly unhealthy to breathe or drink. Social tensions are escalating worldwide. The pandemic is at once a symptom and an accelerant, putting on display the inequities in the United States and abroad that find expression in discrepancies in morbidity and mortality rates from COVID-19 and other health disparities and from state violence at "home" and abroad, the embodiment of the racism of US imperialism that Amy Kaplan documents in The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture. If, as Kaplan suggests, the incorporation of colonial (or postcolonial) territories and populations posed a threat to the ostensible coherence of the national (American) body politic, the conventional story that circulates in science, the media, and popular fiction and film about the bodily threat of microbes materializes the threat to American bodies.1 COVID-19 is certainly not the first, but it is the most recent and perhaps most widespread of what epidemiologists and other medical professionals have dubbed "emerging infections." In the 1980s, the identification of a catastrophic communicable disease that had similarly circled the globe—AIDS—drew the [End Page 707] attention of medical science and epidemiology to what appeared to be a new phenomenon: the emergence of catastrophic communicable diseases that humanity had not previously encountered. In 1989, the epidemiologist Stephen S. Morse organized a meeting of medical professionals to discuss what they labeled "Emerging Viruses: The Evolution of Viruses and Viral Diseases." The eradication of naturally occurring smallpox and other dramatic developments in the identification and treatment of communicable diseases in the 1960s and 1970s had imparted an air of sanguinity to the medical community. The increasing control over communicable disease was hailed as an emblem of progress: human conquest over nature. AIDS and other emerging infections challenged that story. In the analysis that surfaced at the 1989 conference, the new viruses emerged as evidence of the unforeseen and disastrous consequences of that progress: the technological and other advances that contributed to increasing globalization and development practices, including improved transportation that moved people and goods more rapidly around the globe and the settlement of a growing population in previously sparsely inhabited or uninhabited areas around the world. Emerging infections, that is, were material expressions of the dangerous expansiveness and uncontrolled forces of what Kaplan—following W. E. B. Du Bois—called the "anarchy of empire." The message of the conference was clear: the world could not rely on scientific medicine alone to contain this new threat; humans had to change the way we inhabit the planet. As Morse explained in a postconference publication, the deadly outbreaks were the result of "ecological or demographic changes including deforestation, dam building, changes in agricultural products or in land use, and major demographic changes such as population migrations," and humans were the "major engineers of biological traffic."2 The biologist Rachel Carson had issued an analogous warning in her chilling 1962 account of how the "fanatic zeal" to dominate the nonhuman world—"the crusade to create a chemically sterile, insect-free world"—had turned...

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• Coda: Virus

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2021-08-12

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Risk in the global economy is often borne by those with the least political agency or monetary resources, who also bear the brunt of the environmental damage inflicted by a system of unstoppered industrial development. Environmental humanities seeks greater justice and equality within human societies and in all ecological relationships; it can therefore model how risk is absorbed by those without access to economic and political advantage. We have to imagine a more equitable society before we can build it. The environmental humanities can create opportunities for creative and scholarly work to rethink its organizational and logical structure, to risk upending received rhetorical models in creative and scholarly work. Environmental humanities has a chance to reconceive how the “human” relates to the world around it, questioning the human as primary subject and imagining a way of seeing and describing the world as a horizontal shared space rather than a vertical, teleological hierarchy. It’s risky to practice new modes of expression. It’s even riskier to subordinate the human in a field where the word “human” is predominant. Environmental humanities is the place to take that risk.

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Frequent coauthors

• Martin Kevorkian

  University of Houston

  85 shared

• Marisol Lau

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  81 shared

• M. A. Cordova

  Polytechnic José Antonio Echeverría

  81 shared

• Sarah Waggoner

  Southwestern University

  81 shared

• Monica Guzmán

  Southwestern University

  81 shared

• Manuel Lerner

  University of Iowa

  81 shared

• Luis Huechante

  Michigan State University

  81 shared

• Nina Pelle

  Duke University

  81 shared