Decolonizing Disease

Claire Chambers is Professor of Global Literature at the University of York. She is the author of five books, editor of several, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Not only is she known for her research on literary representations of Muslims in Britain and South Asia but also on Indian writing in English, especially the Bengali writer Amitav Ghosh. An emerging specialism is the medical humanities. Alongside Decolonizing Disease: Pandemics, Public Health and Pathogenic Novels, she co-edited (with Xiaohui Liang) a special issue of Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 56(1) entitled ‘Prevailing Pandemic’. Claire has published widely in such journals as Interventions, Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Contemporary Women’s Writing, and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing. Claire was Editor-in-Chief of Literature, Critique, and Empire Today for over a decade. Her research has been supported by grants from HEFCE, the AHRC, ESRC, British Academy, and Leverhulme Trust. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

"Offering a rigorous analysis of how imaginative fiction can both diagnose and resist systemic injustice, Decolonizing Disease draws on a striking range of contemporary international literary voices to trace the racialised, environmental and (neo)colonial dimensions of pandemics mapping continuities between the ‘Spanish flu’ pandemic, HIV/AIDS, Ebola, and Covid-19. Opening up future-facing narrative possibilities, the analysis will provide readers with a compelling and vital account of literature’s power to critique, heal, and reworld public health crises." - Susheila Nasta FRSL MBE, Professor of Modern Literatures and Founding Editor of Wasafiri Magazine