Current projects: book-length cultural analysis of genomics

Priscilla Wald teaches and works on U.S. literature and culture, particularly literature of the late-18th to mid-20th centuries. Her current work focuses on the intersections among the law, literature, science and medicine. Her recent book-length study, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative, considers the intersection of medicine and myth in the idea of contagion and the evolution of the contemporary stories we tell about the global health problem of "emerging infections." She is currently at work on a book-length study of the impact of genomics on current thinking about categories of social, biological and political belonging and on the narrative of human history. She is especially interested in analyzing how information emerging from research in the genome sciences circulates through mainstream media and popular culture and how the language, narratives and images in those media register and promote a particular understanding of the science that is steeped in (often misleading) cultural biases and assumptions. In her research, her teaching and her professional activities, she is committed to promoting conversations among scholars from science, medicine, law and cultural studies in order to facilitate a richer understanding of these issues. Wald is the author of Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form. She is also editor of American Literature as well as on the Editorial Boards of ESQ and Literature and Medicine, co-editor of a book series on nineteenth-century American Literature at NYU Press, and Chair of the Faculty Board of Duke University Press. She has just completed a four-year term on the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association and is currently on the Executive Committee of the American Studies Association. She has a secondary appointment in Women's Studies, is on the steering committees of ISIS (Information Sciences + Information Studies), and the curriculum committees for certificates in Global Health and the Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy, and is an affiliate of the Trent Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities and the Institute for Global Health.