Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

As we continue to grapple with the COVID-19 crisis, this event brings together cultural critics and historians to have a wide-ranging conversation across the domains of epidemiology, microbiology, politics, and literature. We will explore the histories of our pandemic present, as well as examine how the current pandemic is deeply tied to our civic and cultural life.

The Collective for Interdisciplinary Scholarship on Medicine and Culture (CISMAC) at the University of Florida is extremely pleased to welcome speakers Priscilla Wald (Duke University; “A Germ’s Eye View: Changing the Story of Covid-19 and Why That Matters”), Alex Chase-Levenson (University of Pennsylvania; “Quarantine and European Sanitary Citizenship, 1800-1850”), and Lorenzo Servitje (Lehigh University; “The Political and Literary Careers of Antimicrobials”). Zoom Registration. 

Speaker Details:
Priscilla Wald:
Priscilla Wald is the R. Florence Brinkley Distinguished Professor of English at the Duke University and Associate of the Duke Initiative for Science & Society. She teaches and works on U.S. literature and culture, particularly literature of the late-18th to mid-20th centuries, contemporary narratives of science and medicine, science fiction literature and film, law and literature, and environmental studies. She is the author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (Duke University Press, 2007). Wald is also the author of Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (Duke University Press, 1995) and co-editor of volume 6 of the Oxford History of the Novel in English, The American Novel, 1870-1940, and The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science. She is currently at work on a book-length study entitled Human Being After Genocide. She has served as President of the American Studies Association and on the National Council of that organization as well as on the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association and as the MLA representative to the American Council of Learned Societies.

Alex Chase-Levenson:
Alex Chase-Levenson is the Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of The Yellow Flag: Quarantine and the British Mediterranean World, 1780-1860 (Cambridge University Press, 2020). His research interests include borders and boundaries in nineteenth-century Europe, the history of medicine, histories of liberalism, reform, and public health, and the history of museums and display. Before joining Penn’s department, Chase-Levenson received his PhD in history from Princeton University (2015). He has been the recipient of an IHR-Mellon fellowship and a Henry Fellowship to undertake research and study in the UK.

Lorenzo Servitje:
Lorenzo Servitje is Associate Professor of literature and medicine, with a dual appointment in the
Department of English and the Health, Medicine, and Society program at Lehigh University. He holds a PhD in English from the University of California Riverside, and is currently completing a Masters in Public Health at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine. His monograph Medicine Is War: The Martial Metaphor in Victorian Literature and Culture, (SUNY University Press 2021) traces the metaphorical militarization of medicine in the nineteenth century. His current book project, “The Science and Fiction of Antibiosis” examines the history and culture of antibiotics and antibiotic resistance. Servitje’s articles have appeared in journals such as Literature and Medicine, Journal of Medical Humanities, and Science Fiction Studies, and Osiris, among others. He has co-edited three collections: The Walking Med: Zombies and the Medical Image (Penn State 2016), Endemic: Essays in Contagion Theory (Palgrave 2016), and Syphilis and Subjectivity: From the Victorians to the Present (Palgrave 2017). He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Medical Humanities and as an associate editor for Literature and Medicine. He is co-lead of the “Studies in Health Humanities” book series from Lehigh University Press.

Sponsors: The UF Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere (Rothman Endowment) & The Albert Brick Professorship