Epidemiological Realism

This book examines what it means to live in an epidemiological reality, exploring the worldbuilding properties of epidemiology through the lens of critical theory, literary analysis, and visual culture. Whether we want it or not, we live in a world made of statistical correlations, risk factors, and social determinants of health, animal reservoirs and spillovers, containment strategies and curves to be flattened, prophylactic measures, and syndromic surveillance systems detecting in real-time potential outbreaks. This book uses a series of vignettes to show that we have lived in a version of that reality for quite some time now, even before the formalization of epidemiological tools and concepts at the beginning of the twentieth century. Vincent Bruyere is an associate professor of French and a faculty affiliate in the Center for the Study of Human Health at Emory University in Atlanta, USA. He is the author of La Différence Francophone (2012), Perishability Fatigue: Forays into Environmental Loss and Decay (2018), and Environmental Humanities on the Brink: The Vanitas Hypothesis (2023). In 2023–24, he was a research fellow at the Center for Apocalyptic and Post-apocalyptic Studies in Heidelberg, Germany.