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Professor, English
| Office Location: | 327B Allen Building | | Office Phone: | (919) 684-6869 | | Email Address: | 
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Teaching (Fall 2009):
- History 103.03, Lectures special topics
- Friedl bdg 107, MW 10:05 AM-11:20 AM
- English 173.01, Special topics lang/lit
Synopsis
- Friedl bdg 107, MW 10:05 AM-11:20 AM
- English 173s.03, Special topics lang/lit (top)
Synopsis
- Social sciences 105, MW 01:15 PM-02:30 PM
- Genome 178s.03, Topics social impacts of gen
- Social sciences 105, MW 01:15 PM-02:30 PM
- Visualst 190.01, Topics in visual studies
- Friedl bdg 107, MW 10:05 AM-11:20 AM
Education:
- Ph.D. Columbia University 1989
- Special Candidate, Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research Columbia University 1987
- M.A. Columbia University 1981
- B.A., Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude, distinction in the English major Yale University 1980
- Specialties:
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American Literature
Literature and Medicine Literature and Science Literature and Law Gender & Sexuality Studies African American Literature
- Research Interests: American Literature; Literature and Medicine; Literature and Science; Literature and Law; science and new media; race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity;
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. Representative Publications (More Publications)
- P. Wald. Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative. Duke University Press,
2008.
- Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form. Duke UP,
1995. (second printing, 1998)
- P. Wald. "“Geonomics: the Spaces and Races of Citizenship in the Genome Age”." America--From Near and Far: Varieties of American Experience (2007).
- "Blood and Stories: How Genomics is Changing Race, Medicine, and Human History." Patterns of Prejudice 40:4/5 (November,
November, 2006).
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