From the Back Cover
This edited book analyses how artists, authors, and cultural practitioners have responded to and represented episodes of epidemics/pandemics through history. Covering a broad range of notable epidemics/pandemics (black death, cholera, Influenza, AIDS, Ebola, COVID-19), the chapters examine the cultural representations of epidemics and pandemics in different contexts, periods, languages, media, and genres. Interdisciplinary in nature and drawing on perspectives from medicine, literature, medical anthropology, philosophy of medicine, and cultural theory, the book investigates and emphasizes the urgent need to reflect on past catastrophes caused by such outbreaks. By delving into cultural history, it re-examines how societies and communities have responded in the past to species-threatening epidemics/pandemics. Sure to be of interest to lay readers as well as students and researchers, this work situates epidemics and pandemics outbreaks within the contexts of culture and narrative, and their complex and layered representation, commenting on intersections of contagion, culture, and community. It offers a cross-cultural, global, and comparative analysis of the trajectories, histories and responses to various epidemics/pandemics that impacted people worldwide.
Sathyaraj Venkatesan PhD is an Associate Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the National Institute of Technology (NIT), Tiruchirappalli, India. His research concentrates on health humanities, comics studies, and graphic medicine. He is the author of eight books and over ninety-five research publications that span American literature, health humanities, graphic medicine, film studies, and other literary and culture studies disciplines. His recent co-authored books are Metaphors of Mental Illness in Graphic Medicine (Routledge, 2021) and India Retold (Bloomsbury, 2021).
Antara Chatterjee PhD is an Assistant Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, (IISER), Bhopal, India. Her research interests include Indian writing in English, South Asian diasporic literatures, trauma, violence and cultural memory, medical and environmental humanities. She has received grants and fellowships from the University Grants Commission, India, the Charles Wallace India Trust, the Indian Council of Historical Research, and the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, India. She has publications in South Asian Review, Humanities, and in an edited collection of essays The Postcolonial Short Story published by Palgrave Macmillan. She has chapters forthcoming in edited collections to be published by Bloomsbury and Routledge. She is set to be the inaugural Strauss Fellow at the Cedars-Sinai Center for Medicine, Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, LA, USA, in summer 2022.
A. David Lewis PhD is the Eisner Award-nominated author of American Comics, Religion, and Literary Theory: The Superhero Afterlife as well as co-editor of both Graven Images: Religion in Comic Books and Graphic Novels and Muslim Superheroes: Comics, Islam, and Representation. Featured on numerous podcast and television programs, Dr. Lewis is currently program director for the MHS degree at the MCPHS University School of Arts & Sciences where his teaching and research focus on graphic medicine, specifically the depiction of cancer in comic books and graphic novels. Finally, he is the acclaimed author of such comics as The Lone and Level Sands and Kismet, Man of Fate.
Brian Callender M. D. is an Associate Professor of medicine at the University of Chicago. He is a faculty member of the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics and co-organized the 2020-2021 lecture series, ethics and the COVID-19 pandemic: Medical, Social, and Political Issues. As a core faculty member of the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge, he teaches health humanities courses, including: The Body in Medicine and the Performing Arts; Graphic Medicine: Concepts and Practice; The Art of Healing: Medical Aesthetics in Russia andthe U.S.; Death Panels: Exploring Dying and Death through Comics; and The Narratives and Aesthetics of Contagion: Knowledge Formation and the COVID-19 Pandemic. He has also curated two exhibits at the University of Chicago's Special Collections Research Center that examine the visual culture of medicine: Imaging/Imagining: The Body in Anatomical Representation and The Fetus in Utero: From Mystery to Social Media.
