Katherine Shwetz, 2023 Medical Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow
Katherine's research interests have one foot in literary studies and the other in interdisciplinary medical humanities; her work examines how narrative form and medical beliefs are refracted through narratives about vaccines, contagion, and disease. Her current research project examines the role of literary genre in anti-vaccination conspiracies, with the goal of using the tools of literary analysis to sensitively analyze the charged contemporary conversations around vaccines. Her dissertation research studied how a range of intersecting anxieties about embodiment, community, and borders coalesce in narratives of contagion in contemporary Canadian fiction. Prior to joining Rice as a postdoctoral fellow, Katherine completed her PhD at the University of Toronto, her MA at Dalhousie University, and her BA Hon at the University of Saskatchewan. She's also worked a wide range of jobs, including as a health policy analyst in Canada during the COVID-19 outbreak and as a cheesemonger, although that last job doesn't come up as much as she'd like in her current research.