Priscilla Wald

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,…

Research topics

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

Selected publications

• The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science

  Springer eBooks · 2020 · 9 citations

  PublisherDOI

• COVID-19 and the Language of Racism

  Signs · 2021 · 7 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  On May 25, 2020, Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis police officer, murdered George Perry Floyd Jr., and protests erupted in cities and towns across the country. The public health threat of anti-Black police violence in the wake of the pandemic and, more directly, Floyd’s murder led many to describe “twin pandemics” of COVID-19 and racism, a framing that circulated widely. As the analysis emerging from the Black Lives Matter movement has made clear, these are not separate threats: the disproportionate…

  PublisherDOI

• COVID-19: Pandemic Reading

  American Literature · 2020-10-06 · 6 citations

  articleSenior author

  In 1832, a global cholera pandemic reached US shores. Like COVID-19, cholera was a wholly new disease in the United States (although considerably deadlier), and it was, like the novel coronavirus, a poorly understood one that disproportionately affected immigrants and African Americans.1 The cholera pandemic began immediately following Nat Turner’s rebellion, which had triggered a wave of punitive laws against Black Americans. The early 1830s was, in other words, a time of brutal devastation for…

  PublisherDOI

• 14. Cells, Genes, and Stories: HeLa’s Journey from Labs to Literature

  Rutgers University Press eBooks · 2020 · 6 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Contagious

  2020-11-17 · 5 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

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

Similar researchers at Duke University

• Toril Moih-28
• David Aersh-17
• Marianna Torgovnickh-14