How Quarantine Attempts to Universalize the Black Condition

Kelly L. Bezio is associate professor of English at Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi where she researches and teaches in the areas of biopolitical theory, American literature before 1900, critical race studies, and health humanities. Her interdisciplinary scholarship foregrounds how insights from the past help us understand how to combat inequity in our present moment. Her scholarship on quarantine, inoculation, medical secularity, and pastoral racism has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Symbiosis, Digital Defoe, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Literature and Medicine, and Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses. She has served as guest coeditor of special issues on the topic of religion and medicine in the latter two journals. She is currently at work on a book-length study, tentatively titled “Why Don’t Black Lives Matter? An Early American Literary Answer to a Modern Biopolitical Problem.”