Zombies and U.S. healthcare
How can zombie bodies teach us about the inequities of the U.S. health care system?
Kari Nixon
Disability and care
“Bartleby, the Scrivener” is one of the most haunting 19th-century short stories. In this essay, I use a disability theory lens to uncover the true tragedy of the story.
Bleeding sores and globalization
My article on how Daniel Defoe uses oozing sores to comment about the importance of global community connections.
Antibiotics will stop working. What can we do?
In this co-authored article (currently in progress), my colleagues and I propose our design for a targeted advertising campaign via streaming media that tries to get different stakeholders to adopt one or more specific practices for preventing antibiotic resistance. Our…
Outbreak: Contagion and culture in the victorian era
A work-in-progress. A proposed special issue of Journal of Victorian Culture, co-edited with Lakshmi Krishna that will explore the various ways Victorian experience with disease outbreak can help us locate best practices for our own 2020 moment.
The ethical dilemma of asymptomatic carriers
In this academic article, I explore the way healthy carriers have posed unique public health ethics dilemmas since the early 20th century. I cover the case of Mary Mallon (labelled “Typhoid Mary”) to explore possibilities of ethical public health protocol…
Is cleanliness a virtue?
In this essay, for the above proposed special issue on COVID-19, I argue that our legacy of unthinkingly aligning microbial and moral purity dates back to the development of germ theory in the 1880s.
Syphilis and Subjectivity
Medical Humanities Research This co-edited volume of essays, Syphilis and Subjectivity: From the Victorians to the Present, considers how syphilis and understandings of it shaped how people have seen themselves over time, whether infected or not.
Infectious language
Medical Humanities Research How can our language expose our obsession with certain topics? How has disease infected our very language and thought? Co-edited with Lorenzo Servitje explores just this topic.
Motherhood in the digital age
Medical Humanities Research This co-authored book explores how maternity advice has changed as it is filtered through new media sources, replacing it with face-to-face encounters.