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Podcast: Pretty Heady Stuff
Episode: Priscilla Wald on microbial metaphors, outbreak narratives and the politics of pandemic disease.
Description: Priscilla Wald is a Professor of English and Women's Studies at Duke University who has written extensively on the cultural politics of pandemics, past and future. Her books Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form and Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative are essential for understanding the current coronavirus pandemic. Wald offers powerful correctives to the distortions that tend to cloud our thinking about COVID-19 and outbreaks more broadly.