Priscilla Wald, PhD

Associate Professor, Department of English
pwald@duke.edu

The concerns motivating her current scholarly research involve the cultural, rhetorical and ethical dimension of scientific hypotheses and discoveries, especially as they are presented in the specialty and popular press (from Science to The New York Times) and in popular fiction and non-fiction (from the film Outbreak to Laurie Garrett's The Coming Plague). Her manuscript-in-progress evolved out of her ongoing interest in questions of assimilation and immigration. Beginning with an investigation of the phenomenon dubbed by medical historian Alan Kraut "medical nativism," she became interested in the use of disease to express anxiety about strangers and, as she discovered, to configure not only threats to communities, but also communities themselves. The project is now a book-length study of the medical concept of the human carrier, from "Typhoid Mary" to contemporary accounts of genetic carriers. She is fascinated by how fictional and non-fictional (e.g. journalistic, medical, sociological) stories about healthy human vectors of disease (contagious, infectious, genetic) register and promote changes in the way people understand the spatial and social relations that constitute human being and social relations. More broadly, she wants to use the tools of literary analysis to build on work in the history of medicine and medical ethics in order to explore the relationship between medical hypotheses and social and cultural change. In both her scholarly research and her teaching, she is interested in how to foster conversation across the ostensible barriers of the "two cultures." As her research has developed, she became increasingly interested in medical ethics as a teaching field. She attended a two-week faculty seminar sponsored by ELSI (the Ethical, Legal and Social Implications of the Human Genome Project). The seminar was for faculty who wish to teach ELSI classes, and it focused on designing ELSI syllabi. She plans to begin teaching such classes in 2002-03. She sees her future work in both teaching and research continuing to develop in these areas and perhaps expanding in the direction Study of Medical Ethics and Humanities and to participate in the events and discussions at the Center.