The humanities can reveal the truth of the world’s crises, everything from contagions like the pandemic to apocalypses like right-wing violence.

Priscilla Wald
Priscilla Wald, R. Florence Brinkley Chair of English at Duke University, is the author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (2008) and Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (1995), both published by Duke University Press. She is working on a monograph tentatively entitled “Human Being after Genocide.”
Listen to the Birds
Avian flu came from environmental devastation, an increasingly interconnected world, and a growing population—just like COVID-19.