We are delighted to welcome Wai Chee Dimock, William Lampson Professor Emeritus of American Studies and English at Yale University. Professor Dimock's talk is titled A Long History of Pandemics.
The event will be held at 5pm in the Terrace Room of Margaret Jacks Hall. The talk will be preceded by a reception in the Terrace Room from 4:30pm.
A Long History of Pandemics tells an epic story, beginning with vaccine development in the twenty-first century, and reaching back to the smallpox epidemic in the eighteenth. Focusing on the Cherokee’s public health strategies and the Navajo’s collaboration with NASA in drought forecasting, we explore the art of narrative as a crucial complement to science and technology, turning the legacy of harm from the past into a path towards a different future.
Wai Chee Dimock writes about public health, climate change, and indigenous communities, focusing on the symbiotic relation between diverse forms of intelligence. She is now at Harvard’s Center for the Environment, working on a new book, “Saved by Nonhumans: Surviving Pandemics and Climate Change with Microbes and Machines,” and on a collaborative project, “AI for Climate Resilience,” cosponsored by Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and Yale’s Jackson School of Global Affairs.
Dimock’s most recent book is Weak Planet (2020). Other books include Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time (2006); Shades of the Planet (2007); and a team-edited anthology, American Literature in the World: Anne Bradstreet to Octavia Butler ( 2017). Her 1996 book, Residues of Justice: Literature, Law, Philosophy, was reissued in a new edition in 2021. Her essays have appeared in Artforum, Chronicle of Higher Education, The Hill, Los Angeles Review of Books, New York Times, New Yorker, and Scientific American.
Dimock was a consultant for “Invitation to World Literature,” a 13-part series produced by WGBH and aired on PBS stations in the fall of 2010. A related Facebook forum, “Rethinking World Literature,” is still ongoing.
