Health Humanities Syllabus Repository

Narratives of Contagion

This graduate seminar will explore how narratives of contagion impact issues of individual and public health; social, environmental, and health justice; and cultural belonging. Like the germs themselves, stories about contagious disease spread and mutate in various forms of fiction and nonfiction. Through our study of narratives of contagion, broadly defined, we will attempt to answer some of the following questions: How have conceptualizations and representations of contagion changed over time? What is the relationship between contagious disease and forms of literary and cultural production? How has the rhetoric of epidemics been adopted in different contexts? To what ends? How do narratives of contagion constitute a vision of what society is and may become? Why are we compelled to respond to and prepare for epidemics through fiction?

Graduate (MA, PhD)

Kym Weed

Disease/Illness

English

Literature/Literary Studies

Nashville, TN

face-to-face

Vanderbilt University

Narratives of Contagion