Priscilla Wald

Priscilla Wald is a professor of English at Duke University, and the 2011-12 President of the American Studies Association. Wald teaches and works on U.S. literature and culture, particularly literature of the late-18th to mid-20th centuries. The author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (2008), Wald is working on a series of essays that explore the impact of genomics on current thinking about categories of social, biological and political belonging and on the narrative of human history. Wald is also working on several essays on American literature and culture for essay collections and co-editing an Oxford University Press volume on the history of the American novel, 1870-1940. Included among her many publications is Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (1995), and she is editor of American Literature. She has a secondary appointment in Women's Studies, is on the Duke University steering committee of ISIS (Information Sciences + Information Studies) and is a member of the Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy and an affiliate of the Trent Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities and the Institute for Global Health.