Immunity and Contagion: Liberalism, the Age of Bio-Politics, and the Tree of Life

Presenter Information

CC Wharram, Eastern Illinois University

Location

Witters conference Room, Booth 4440

Start Date

27-11-2018 4:00 PM

Description

CC Wharram, Director of EIU’s Center for the Humanities, will help commemorate the 100^th anniversary of the Great Influenza pandemic by addressing the long history of biopolitics in his talk about the 300^th anniversary of smallpox inoculation. We think of biopolitics as a condition brought about recently, or at the very least in the 20^th century, yet scholars in varying fields of research have argued that the study of immunology, with its roots in the 17^th and 18^th century, is key to understanding our human condition at the beginning of the 21^st century.

Comments

Dr. Wharram’s research focuses on translation studies, Romantic and Gothic literature, and the intersections between literature, philosophy, and science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He is drawn to scholarship that puts the humanities, translation, and the sciences into conversation, to which his recent essays “Nothing Human” in Educational Theory (October 2014) and “‘A Proper Contagion’: The Inoculation Narrative and the Immunological Turn” in the collection Transforming Contagion: Risky Contacts among Bodies, Disciplines, and Nations (2018) testify. He also edited a special volume on “Teaching Romantic Translation(s)” for Romantic Circle Pedagogies (July 2014), and is completing a translation of Goethe's The Passion of Young Werther under contract with Broadview Press.