Priscilla Wald
Biographic Data
| ID | 141089 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Priscilla Wald |
| GIVEN NAMES | Priscilla |
| FAMILY NAME | Wald |
| SIGNATURE | WALD P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Duke University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 219 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1990 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
The Cambridge Companion to American Utopian Literature and Culture since 1945
Providing a comprehensive overview of American thought in the period following World War II, after which the US became a global military and economic leader, this book explores the origins of American utopianism and provides a trenchant critique from the point of view of those left out of the hegemonic ideal. Centring the voices of those oppressed by or omitted from the consumerist American Dream, this book celebrates alternative ways of thinking…
Afterword
With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, I found myself returning in my thinking, reading, writing, and teaching to the classical understanding of plagues as messages from the gods that something was out of order in the social world. The pandemic has highlighted many aspects of the social world in the United States (and elsewhere) that are out of order, including structural racism, socioeconomic inequities, climate change and environmental devast…
Resilience
Resilience . . . Priscilla Wald (bio) From re (back) and salire (to jump, leap), “the act of rebounding or springing back; rebound, recoil”—The Oxford English Dictionary sets the first usage of resilience in the seventeenth century and in the nineteenth adds “elasticity; the power of resuming the original shape or position after compression, bending, etc.” Less common usages include: “revolt, recoil from something,” and “repugnance, antagonism.” …
Microbes of Empire
Microbes of Empire Priscilla Wald (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Anti-Asian hate crimes rose dramatically during the pandemic. This poster appeared in the New York subway in February 2021. Credit: STAR MAX file photo via AP. [End Page 706] In memory of Amy Kaplan We are living in a moment in which the natural world and the social world are manifesting dramatic chaos, beset with reminders of the precarity of human existence in th…
Language Matters
Covid-19 and the Language of Racism
On May 25, 2020, Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis police officer, murdered George Perry Floyd Jr., and protests erupted in cities and towns across the country. The public health threat of anti-Black police violence in the wake of the pandemic and, more directly, Floyd’s murder led many to describe “twin pandemics” of COVID-19 and racism, a framing that circulated widely. As the analysis emerging from the Black Lives Matter movement has made clear, th…
Covid-19: Pandemic Reading
In 1832, a global cholera pandemic reached US shores. Like COVID-19, cholera was a wholly new disease in the United States (although considerably deadlier), and it was, like the novel coronavirus, a poorly understood one that disproportionately affected immigrants and African Americans.1 The cholera pandemic began immediately following Nat Turner’s rebellion, which had triggered a wave of punitive laws against Black Americans. The early 1830s was…
Xenopolitics
Xenopolitics Matthew A. Taylor (bio) and Priscilla Wald (bio) Lilith Iyapo wakes up after a very long sleep—more than two centuries—to discover she had developed cancer and been cured. The alien creatures who cured her, moreover, have altered her genetically, fixing the underlying mutation that predisposed her to cancer. That's the least of her revelations, actually, since the alien species did much more than cure Lilith. They rescued remnants of…
Engineering the Environment: Phytotrons and the Quest for Climate Control in the Cold War
In Christian Nyby and Howard Hawks's 1951 film The Thing from Another World, the stereotypical postwar man of science, Dr. Arthur Carrington, is delighted to discover that the apparently humanoid alien who has just landed near his North Pole research station is actually “porous unconnected vegetable growth,” which is to say, in effect, a walking vegetable. The mind should not “boggle” at such a thing, he chides. As anyone familiar with the earth'…
Replicant Being
In 1980, the Supreme Court determined that a genetically modified organism was patentable. Ten years later, the California Supreme Court ruled that a person did not have ownership rights in his cells. Both cases were crucial for the development of biotechnology as a multibillion dollar business. Both also contributed to changing conceptions of the human and of life itself. This chapter chronicles legal and political efforts to resolve the hazy de…
Viral Cultures: Microbes and Politics in the Cold War
Christopher Hamlin, More Than Hot: A Short History of Fever
Charles E. Rosenberg concludes his Foreword to More Than Hot: A Short History of Fever with the provocative observation that ‘Christopher Hamlin has written an extraordinarily ambitious biography of a dead cultural entity that lives on in altered and attenuated form’ (p. x). The image conjures the zombies who make a brief appearance at the conclusion of this work, ‘the reigning fantasy of post apocalyptic contagion’. For Hamlin, zombies explicitl…
The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction
The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction explores the relationship between the ideas and themes of American science fiction and their roots in the American cultural experience. Science fiction in America has long served to reflect the country's hopes, desires, ambitions, and fears. The ideas and conventions associated with science fiction are pervasive throughout American film and television, comics and visual arts, games and gaming, a…
The “Hidden Tyrant”
Edward Bernays derived his ideas about propaganda from his assumptions about the unconscious. “The Hidden Tyrant” shows how his writings built on new concepts about the nature of the human based on a growing acceptance of the idea his uncle, Sigmund Freud, had put into circulation in the early twentieth century. Increasing acceptance of the unconscious, however, generated concerns about the nature of human susceptibility to external influences, e…
American Studies and the Politics of Life
American Studies and the Politics of Life Priscilla Wald (bio) In February 1951 an African American woman named Henrietta Lacks sought treatment at the gynecology clinic of the Johns Hopkins University Hospital. She did not know that the symptoms that had brought her there signaled an exceptionally aggressive cervical cancer or that the mutating cells that were killing her would enable one of the most significant developments in twentieth-century…
Biomedical Ambiguity: Race, Asthma, and the Contested Meaning of Genetic Research in the Caribbean
Journal Article Biomedical Ambiguity: Race, Asthma, and the Contested Meaning of Genetic Research in the Caribbean Get access Ian Whitmarsh, Biomedical Ambiguity: Race, Asthma, and the Contested Meaning of Genetic Research in the Caribbean, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2008. Pp. viii + 225. $21.95. ISBN 978 0 8014 7441 5. Priscilla Wald Priscilla Wald Duke University [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford …
Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative
How should we understand the fear and fascination elicited by the accounts of communicable disease outbreaks that proliferated, following the emergence of HIV, in scientific publications and the mainstream media? The repetition of particular characters, images, and story lines-of Patients Zero and superspreaders, hot zones and tenacious microbes-produced a formulaic narrative as they circulated through the media and were amplified in popular fict…
Editors' Preface: Genomics in Literature, Visual Arts, and Culture
Blood and stories: How genomics is rewriting race, medicine and human history
In 2003 Howard University announced its intention to create a databank of the DNA of African Americans, most of whom were patients in their medical centre. Proponents of the decision invoked the routine exclusion of African Americans from research that would give them access to the most up-to-date medical technologies and treatments. They argued that this databank would rectify such exclusions. Opponents argued that such a move tacitly affirmed t…
What's in a Cell: John Moore's Spleen and the Language of Bioslavery
What's in a Cell?:John Moore's Spleen and the Language of Bioslavery Priscilla Wald (bio) Among the most eccentric characters in contemporary U.S. literature, John Barth's Harrison Mack fills his basement with hun-dreds of pickle jars containing his bodily waste, including "hair- and nail-clippings, urine, feces."1 The jars represent the rich, powerful, and aging pickle tycoon's bid for an immortality of sorts, and, as neuroses go, it is not all …
Anniversaries and “Whispering Ambitions”: American Literature at 75
Communicable Americanism: Contagion, Geographic Fictions, and the Sociological Legacy of Robert E. Park
1Duke University
Complaining, Conversing, and Coalescing
Future Perfect: Grammar, Genes and Geography
New Literary History - Volume 31, Number 4, Autumn 2000
The Other Henry James
Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative
How should we understand the fear and fascination elicited by the accounts of communicable disease outbreaks that proliferated, following the emergence of HIV, in scientific publications and the mainstream media? The repetition of particular characters, images, and story lines-of Patients Zero and superspreaders, hot zones and tenacious microbes-produced a formulaic narrative as they circulated through the media and were amplified in popular fict…
Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form
Blood and stories: How genomics is rewriting race, medicine and human history
In 2003 Howard University announced its intention to create a databank of the DNA of African Americans, most of whom were patients in their medical centre. Proponents of the decision invoked the routine exclusion of African Americans from research that would give them access to the most up-to-date medical technologies and treatments. They argued that this databank would rectify such exclusions. Opponents argued that such a move tacitly affirmed t…
American Studies and the Politics of Life
American Studies and the Politics of Life Priscilla Wald (bio) In February 1951 an African American woman named Henrietta Lacks sought treatment at the gynecology clinic of the Johns Hopkins University Hospital. She did not know that the symptoms that had brought her there signaled an exceptionally aggressive cervical cancer or that the mutating cells that were killing her would enable one of the most significant developments in twentieth-century…
What's in a Cell: John Moore's Spleen and the Language of Bioslavery
What's in a Cell?:John Moore's Spleen and the Language of Bioslavery Priscilla Wald (bio) Among the most eccentric characters in contemporary U.S. literature, John Barth's Harrison Mack fills his basement with hun-dreds of pickle jars containing his bodily waste, including "hair- and nail-clippings, urine, feces."1 The jars represent the rich, powerful, and aging pickle tycoon's bid for an immortality of sorts, and, as neuroses go, it is not all …
Future Perfect: Grammar, Genes and Geography
New Literary History - Volume 31, Number 4, Autumn 2000
Terms of Assimilation: Legislating Subjectivity in the Emerging Nation
In the United States during the nineteenth century, debates concerning the status of indigenous tribespeople and slaves register unresolved legal conflicts that troubled claims of national unity. In particular, two Supreme Court cases-Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) and Scott v. Sandford (Dred Scott, 1857)-demonstrate the genesis of these debates in the territorial expansion that similarly added urgency to the potent issue of states' rights. Bo…
Covid-19 and the Language of Racism
On May 25, 2020, Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis police officer, murdered George Perry Floyd Jr., and protests erupted in cities and towns across the country. The public health threat of anti-Black police violence in the wake of the pandemic and, more directly, Floyd’s murder led many to describe “twin pandemics” of COVID-19 and racism, a framing that circulated widely. As the analysis emerging from the Black Lives Matter movement has made clear, th…
Microbes of Empire
Microbes of Empire Priscilla Wald (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Anti-Asian hate crimes rose dramatically during the pandemic. This poster appeared in the New York subway in February 2021. Credit: STAR MAX file photo via AP. [End Page 706] In memory of Amy Kaplan We are living in a moment in which the natural world and the social world are manifesting dramatic chaos, beset with reminders of the precarity of human existence in th…
Fabulous shadows: Rethinking the Emersonian tradition
Fabulous Shadows: Rethinking the Emersonian Tradition Priscilla Wald (bio) At Emerson’s Tomb: The Politics of Classic American Literature. By John Carlos Rowe. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. 292 pages. $49.50 (cloth). >$16.50 (paper). “This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.” Thus, Hart Crane pays tribute to a master, Herman Melville, in “At Melville’s Tomb,” one of his most widely anthologized poems. Crane is certainly not the first…
Hearing Narrative Voices in Melville's Pierre
Hearing Narrative Voices in Melville's Pierre
Terms of Assimilation: Legislating Subjectivity in the Emerging Nation
In the United States during the nineteenth century, debates concerning the status of indigenous tribespeople and slaves register unresolved legal conflicts that troubled claims of national unity. In particular, two Supreme Court cases-Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) and Scott v. Sandford (Dred Scott, 1857)-demonstrate the genesis of these debates in the territorial expansion that similarly added urgency to the potent issue of states' rights. Bo…
Where My Heart Is Turning Ever: Civil War Stories and Constitutional Reform, 1861-1876
Journal Article Where My Heart Is Turning Ever: Civil War Stories and Constitutional Reform, 1861–1876. By Kathleen Diffley. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992.1, 236 pp. $30.00, ISBN 0-8203-1445-5.) Get access Priscilla Wald Priscilla Wald Columbia University, New York, New York Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 81, Issue 1, June 1994, Pages 283–284, https://doi.o…
Neither Citizen Nor Alien: National Narratives, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Self-Definition
A “Losing-Self Sense”: The Making of Americans and the Anxiety of Identity
“As From a Faithful Mirror”: Pierre, Our Nig, and Literary Nationalism
“The Strange Meaning of Being Black”: The Souls of Black Folk and the Narrative of History
Index
Selected Bibliography
Anti-Apocalypse: Exercises in Genealogical Criticism
Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form
History and Memory in African-American Culture
Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form
Cultures and Carriers: "Typhoid Mary" and the Science of Social Control
En 1907, un cas de typhoide a Long Island, aux Etats-Unis, a conduit a l'elaboration de la notion de « porteur sain » d'une maladie contagieuse. Cet article montre comment ce cas, sous le nom infâmant de « Typhoid Mary », a influence les politiques sanitaires et servi d'exutoire a l'anxiete collective
The Power of the Porch: The Storyteller's Craft in Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, and Randall Kenan
Southern literature is often celebrated for its told, rather than written, qualities. Drawing on her own experiences of front-porch storytelling among family, friends, and neighbors, Trudier Harris looks across the generations of twentieth-century southern writers to focus on three African Americans who possess the of the porch.In ways that are highly individual, says Harris, yet still within a shared oral tradition, Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Na…
Fabulous shadows: Rethinking the Emersonian tradition
Fabulous Shadows: Rethinking the Emersonian Tradition Priscilla Wald (bio) At Emerson’s Tomb: The Politics of Classic American Literature. By John Carlos Rowe. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. 292 pages. $49.50 (cloth). >$16.50 (paper). “This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.” Thus, Hart Crane pays tribute to a master, Herman Melville, in “At Melville’s Tomb,” one of his most widely anthologized poems. Crane is certainly not the first…
The Other Henry James
Complaining, Conversing, and Coalescing
Future Perfect: Grammar, Genes and Geography
New Literary History - Volume 31, Number 4, Autumn 2000
Communicable Americanism: Contagion, Geographic Fictions, and the Sociological Legacy of Robert E. Park
1Duke University
Anniversaries and “Whispering Ambitions”: American Literature at 75
What's in a Cell: John Moore's Spleen and the Language of Bioslavery
What's in a Cell?:John Moore's Spleen and the Language of Bioslavery Priscilla Wald (bio) Among the most eccentric characters in contemporary U.S. literature, John Barth's Harrison Mack fills his basement with hun-dreds of pickle jars containing his bodily waste, including "hair- and nail-clippings, urine, feces."1 The jars represent the rich, powerful, and aging pickle tycoon's bid for an immortality of sorts, and, as neuroses go, it is not all …
Blood and stories: How genomics is rewriting race, medicine and human history
In 2003 Howard University announced its intention to create a databank of the DNA of African Americans, most of whom were patients in their medical centre. Proponents of the decision invoked the routine exclusion of African Americans from research that would give them access to the most up-to-date medical technologies and treatments. They argued that this databank would rectify such exclusions. Opponents argued that such a move tacitly affirmed t…
Editors' Preface: Genomics in Literature, Visual Arts, and Culture
Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative
How should we understand the fear and fascination elicited by the accounts of communicable disease outbreaks that proliferated, following the emergence of HIV, in scientific publications and the mainstream media? The repetition of particular characters, images, and story lines-of Patients Zero and superspreaders, hot zones and tenacious microbes-produced a formulaic narrative as they circulated through the media and were amplified in popular fict…
History (19 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Political science (16 works) · Law (14 works) · Art (12 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · History (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Literature (8 works)