Priscilla Wald uses Literature to Track the Outbreak Narrative

Priscilla Wald stands outside her Durham home, with a back drop of the Duke Forest behind her.

Duke University professor Priscilla Wald used to have a recurring dream about learning how to fly. The R. Florence Brinkley Distinguished Professor of English said that in her dream, people all around her realized they could tap into this new ability, buried deep in their brains. One by one, they took off. 

Wald learned how to fly too, and she woke up with a realization. “This dream, in a small way, is what teaching is,” she said, “Teaching and learning are about realizing something new about the world, about ourselves. That’s what it’s all about, and that’s why I love what I do.” 

“And I really, really love what I do,” Wald said.

Wald majored in English during her undergraduate years at Yale University. Studying English led her to explore anthropology and American studies, and she found herself with a burning curiosity about the political and cultural narratives unfolding around her.

After graduating from Yale in 1980, she continued studying English and American studies at Columbia University and, after earning her PhD. in English in 1989, she has been teaching ever since. She taught at Cornell University and the University of Washington before moving to Durham, where she lives with her husband.  

Although Wald said she loves reading and thinking about literary works, analyzing literature wasn’t quite enough for her. She felt an urge to tie themes of social justice into her work, she said. She searched for ways to make a positive impact on those around her by working with literature. “You have to leave the world better than you found it,” Wald said, “You have to work on the injustices.” 

Wald studies the intersections of literature and law, the environment, and science and medicine. She has published two books noting that she began to write when she realized that she could use writing to teach her students in new ways. 

“It occurred to me that writing was a form of teaching, and I started writing for my students,” she said. Writing has also helped Wald in her quest for social justice.

The idea for Wald’s first book began when she stumbled upon a pair of Supreme Court cases from the 19th century. One case was brought to court by an enslaved man, and the other by a Cherokee man. The court determined that, because both individuals were neither citizens nor aliens, they were not “persons in law.”

Wald was astonished by this concept. “I began a deep dive into theories about law, and what the law was, and why the law had this authority to make people ‘persons’ or ‘not persons,’” Wald said, “and that became my first book.” Wald published Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form in 1995.

Her second book, published in 2007, hits extremely close to home. In writing Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative, Wald studied the society around her as it recovered from the HIV epidemic in the 1980s. In the 1990s, as doctors were still fighting against HIV and AIDS, Wald noticed a strange obsession in those around her.

“In the mid ‘90s, everyone was talking about this idea of emerging infections, diseases, novel viruses. It’s right where we are now,” Wald said, “It was a story of crisis and survival.”

So Wald approached the cultural obsession with outbreak the best way she knew how: through literature. She examined how information circulated through images, storylines, and word choice. “I take the things I learned from analyzing poetry and literature, and I apply it to cultural narratives,” Wald said.

The outbreak narrative is the story of a pandemic on a cultural canvas, Wald said. “I tracked how visual images and words and metaphors got out, and passed from science into scientific journalism and popular fiction and film,” she said, “and it became this conventional story that I call the outbreak narrative.” 

The outbreak narrative can be dangerous, Wald said. The outbreak narrative might tell us that epidemiologists have everything under control, or that doctors will be able to cure the sick. It might tell us that nothing is really as bad as we fear, and that the threat will go away before too much damage is done. Sound familiar?

“We have an opportunity with COVID to rewrite this narrative,” Wald said. 

“We’ll have some kind of end point to our current pandemic,” she continued. “Will we tell this as a story of technological triumph and medical science saving the day, or will we take a really good, hard look at what needs to change?”

It’s no coincidence the Black Lives Matter movement is gaining momentum as a virus that disproportionately sickens and kills people of color takes over the globe, Wald said. “Structural racism is inseparable from the conditions that predispose someone of color to this pandemic.”

This is a moment of pause, and possibly the only one we’ll get in our lifetime. This is a chance for change, Wald said, and a chance to get at the roots of our society’s problems. 

And Wald is happy she can spend this pause in the classroom. It’s probably the best place for exchanging ideas and exposing yourself to something new, she said. 

As Wald sat cross-legged in her Durham home, a laptop camera in front of her and the vast expanse of the Duke Forest visible through a large window behind her, I got the feeling she could talk about teaching for hours. One of her favorite things about being in the classroom, she said, is feeling challenged. She loves when a student questions her ideas and makes her think about something in a different way.

“My students say things that open my mind, and there is not a class that I’ve had where that hasn’t happened,” Wald said. “I’ve always learned as much as I’ve taught.”