Special Issue

Special Issue: Science, Technology, and Literature during Plague and Pandemics Tim Urban, Melissa Littlefield, and Rajani Sudan Introduction The role of universities and intellectuals in both the management and analyses of COVID-19 cannot be understated. Paul Basken notes in the February issue of Times Higher Education that “many of the Covid inoculations now being conducted around the world were made possible by techniques painstakingly developed at the University of Pennsylvania for manipulating messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA).”1 Without long-term university-based research, our current ability to fight the virus with vaccines may not have occurred within such a short time period.2 As Basken’s article makes clear, university departments and researchers often face numerous roadblocks to having their work recognized: funding, name recognition, professional status, and even political or ideological barriers. Regarding Penn’s case, Basken notes how the researcher, an adjunct professor named Katalin Karikó, initially tasked with finding ways to manipulate [End Page 365] mRNA, was “jilted” by her own institution and never given credit for her work; instead, her requests for funding were initially dismissed due to her marginal position within the academy. Ultimately, the university passed Karikó’s findings on to more recognizable scholars within her field. Too often, these roadblocks to scientific discovery go unnoticed because news outlets focus on the end products of headline-worthy research.3 But, as SLSA scholars, we understand that science is better understood once it is contextualized within historical, cultural, political, and social discourses, which necessitates a transdisciplinary approach rather than a singular—sometimes hyperbolic—lens. Indeed, rather than simply focusing on results or methodologies, a successful transdisciplinary approach considers the underlying processes—material, institutional, economic, and political—that enable, sometimes disable, and almost universally inform scientific research. We bring up the example of Professor Karikó because it shows science’s entanglement with academic politics. According to Basken, the fact that Karikó’s role in mRNA was glossed over by Penn illustrates the obstacles that often accompany academic research. Basken writes, “the degree that Penn and others allow [these issues] to come out raises the prospect for academic research of high-profile pressure in key areas of long-standing concern,” which include “the federal funding of basic science, the academies treatment of the lesser privileged, and the structural biases inside governmental and journal peer review practices.”4 The Karikó case highlights why critical and analytical approaches must also consider inequities within universities inside and outside the context of a pandemic. Institutions provide platforms for certain voices while potentially endorsing the erasure of others. We created this special issue because we believe a range of trans-disciplinary voices can help us better understand the complex facets of the pandemic. Rather than confine contributors to narrow guidelines, we decided to put out a call for papers that included a wide range of possible topics: colonialism, imperialism, and the spread of disease; plague representations; disease narratives in social media, mass media, and science; representations of disease and socio-economic inequalities; abstraction, naturalization, and disease as Other; [End Page 366] human connection, screen technologies, and social distancing; and misinformation and science skepticism. We believe this range encourages connections between the current pandemic and a longer history of disease representation. Moreover, we sought submissions that examined intersections between literature, science, art, and technology, making manifest the journal’s mission to encourage cross-disciplinary conversations. And we would like to take a moment to thank all the authors who submitted interesting, timely, and thoughtful abstracts. It was incredibly difficult to narrow the field down to the five essays you now hold in your hands. Of course, while we prepared the issue and now, again, as we write this introduction, other journals and academic presses are releasing an abundance of literature on Covid-19. Open access collections, such as “Lockdown Texts” published by BioSocieties, sit alongside special issues from across the academy: from risk analysis to epidemics, from economics to young adult experiences.5 With so many special issues being published, why do we need another one to explore our current understanding of the pandemic and its relation to our lives? Adding to reasons already mentioned, we believe that Configurations offers scholars a

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