International Health Humanities Network Membership

I am currently an MSCA-funded postdoctoral researcher based at University College Dublin and the University of Reading. My project - 'Violence as Contagious: Historicising Anglophone Narratives of Violence, Health, and Disease, 1800s to the Present' - traces the "violence as contagious" narrative to the nineteenth century, to establish a clearer historicisation of the phenomenon and to demonstrate how literary strategies can contribute to the ongoing global implementation of public health approaches to violence. Anglophone understandings of violence underwent a shift during the nineteenth century: from being predominantly linked to original sin and self-determined morality, to being primarily considered through technologies of observation and control which had also emerged around contagious diseases in the period. There simultaneously emerged a cultural tendency to create analogies between violence and contagious diseases. Placing literary texts in dialogue with cultural and scientific discourses, this study shows how narrative strategies became vital to the history of health and, more specifically, how the “violence as contagious” narrative became central to debates around criminal responsibility and the rise of violence as a cultural problem. Building on Ivan Perry’s (2009) public health theory of violence, my research offers an original literary approach to historical and ongoing conceptualisations of violence and health, specifically via illuminating the expansive possibilities – through intersectoral collaboration – and potential limitations – through the reinforcement of inequalities and power imbalances – of the “violence as contagious” narrative.