Priscilla Wald teaches and works on U.S. literature and culture, particularly literature of the late-18th to mid-20th centuries. Her current work focuses on the intersections among the law, literature, science and medicine. She is currently completing two projects, one on contagion, culture and the evolution of the outbreak narrative, and the other work on the public understanding of the genome sciences. She is especially interested in analyzing how the language, narratives and images in the popular media register and promote a particular understanding of the science that is steeped in (often misleading) cultural biases and assumptions. In her research, her teaching and her professional activities, she is committed to promoting conversations among scholars from science, medicine, law and cultural studies in order to facilitate a richer understanding of these issues.

Priscilla is the author of Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form. She is also associate editor of the Duke-based journal American Literature. She has a secondary appointment in Women's Studies, is on the steering committee of the Center for Genome Ethics, Law and Policy and for ISIS (Information Sciences + Information Studies), the internal advisory committee of the Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy, and is an affiliate of the Center for Medical Ethics and Humanities.

To read an interview with Prof. Wald about her interest in studying genomics, click here