Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
Contact
Email: adams_kim@wheatoncollege.edu
Phone: 508-286-3250
Website: https://kimadams.electrictext.net/
About
Interests
Literature and Medicine; Critical Theory; Race and Reproduction. Burnout; Hyperreality; Hibiscus Tea. Drive-in Movie Theaters; Low Back Pain; Reproductive Justice. Objects; Food; Rooms. Capitalism; Neurasthenia; Spiritualism; Phrenology; Hydropathy; Historical Materialism. Psychoanalysis. Walt Whitman; Margaret Fuller; William James; Cora Hatch; Pauline Hopkins; Gertrude Stein; George Miller Beard; George Schuyler; Ralph Ellison; Sylvia Plath; William Grey Walter; Ken Kesey; Allen Ginsberg. Eugenics, Dialectics, Semiotics. Not Dianetics! The Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862; Octagon Houses; Knitting Machines. The Merry Pranksters; The Whole Earth Catalog; The Tassajara Bread Book; Our Bodies, Ourselves. Erhardt Training Seminars; Tom Wolfe; the Flicker Effect. Shock Therapy; Disability Studies; Treatment Resistant Depression; Hoarding.
Podcast
Publications
Peer-reviewed Articles
“Loose Attitudes: Satire and Self-Knowledge in Our Bodies, Ourselves and The House of God,” in special issue on “Wounded Healers and the Politics of Wellbeing: Healthcare Practitioners’ Emotion in 20th Century Anglo-America.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 78 no. 4 (October 2023): 381-400. doi: 10.1093/jhmas/jrad025
“‘Electrical Nutrition and Glandular Control’: Eugenics, Medical Science, and George Schuyler’s Black No More.” Twentieth-Century Literature 68, no. 2 (June 2022): 113-150. doi: 10.1215/0041462X-9808065
“‘Now I know how to not repeat history’: Teaching and Learning Through a Pandemic with the Medical Humanities.” Journal of Medical Humanities 42, no. 4 (December 2021). Co-author with Patrick Deer, Trace Jordan, and Perri Klass. doi: 10.1007/s10912-021-09716-z
“Schrödinger’s Student.” The Midwest Quarterly 59, no. 1 (Autumn 2017): 8-22.
Public Writing
“Feminist Eugenics: Coerced Sterilization and Mandated Maternity.” Post45. In Contemporaries Cluster Abortion Now, Abortion Forever. (30 June 2023). post45.org
“It’s Time for Academe to Take Podcasting Seriously.” Inside Higher Ed. (28 September 2021). Co-author with the founding members of the Humanities Podcasting Network.
“Medical Residencies Use Automated Matching. Professorships Should, Too.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. (11 January 2021). insidehighered.com
“Vibrators Had a Long History as Medical Quackery Before Feminists Rebranded Them as Sex Toys.” The Conversation (8 June 2020). theconversation.com Reprinted in Discover Magazine. (30 June 2020). discovermagazine.com Translated as “Quand les vibromasseurs étaient censés soigner” in The Conversation France. thecoversation.com
“Theory: A Sunday Turn.” In Re: Theory a Sunday. Organism for Poetic Research, 2016.
Book Reviews
“Timothy Leary Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: On Benjamin Breen’s ‘Tripping on Utopia.'” Los Angeles Review of Books (21 Feb 2024). lareviewofbooks.org
“Patrick Kindig, Fascination: Trance, Enchantment, & American Modernity.” American Literary History 35 no. 4 (Winter 2023): 1959-1961. doi: 10.1093/alh/ajad182
“Modernistic Concoctions: Edible Roots of Race Science in American Fiction.” Review of Katherine Keyser, Artificial Color: Modern Food and Racial Fictions. Configurations 31 no. 1 (Winter 2023): 91-3. doi: 10.1353/con.2023.0005
“Is Burnout the New Nostalgia?” Review of Thomas Dodman. What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly Emotion. Literature and Medicine 40 no. 1 (Spring 2022): 167-171. doi: 10.1353/lm.2022.0014
“Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History by Jaipreet Virdi (review).” Modernism/Modernity 29 no. 1 (January 2022): 214-216. doi: 10.1353/mod.2021.0085
“Agnes Malinowska, ‘Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Fungal Female Animal.’” Journal of Literature and Science. 13, no. 1 (2020). doi: 10.12929/jls.13.1.06
“Emily Ogden, Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism.” Social History of Medicine 33, no. 3 (August 2020). doi: 10.1093/shm/hkz132
“Jennifer Lieberman and Ronald Kline, ‘Dream of an Unfettered Electrical Future.’” Journal of Literature and Science 12, no. 2 (2019). doi: 10.12929/jls.12.2.05
“Daniel Morris, Not Born Digital: Poetics, Print Literacy, New Media.” The British Society for Literature and Science (December 2017). bsls.ac.uk
Teaching Interests
Confronting Eugenics: Medical Humanities and Race (ENG 298, MW 2:00-3:30, Spring 2025)
Coined in 1883 by Frances Galton, eugenics derives from the Greek roots, εὐ (eu) for good or well, and γεν (gen) for to be born and to beget. American doctors, professors, and politicians, conservative and liberal alike, embraced eugenics as a means to improve the nation. But not everyone agreed. This course examines the responses of writers of color to eugenic ideas of race, from the racial uplift and hybrid eugenics of the New Negro Movement to feminist activism and the Chicana Movement, to science fiction futures of cloning and genetic enhancement. Together we will explore how these responses have shaped the legacies of race science in modern medical practice, from genetic counseling to reproductive justice.
Communication Theory: Race, Health, and Gender (DMC 298, MW 12:30-1:50, Spring 2025)
Is race a social construct? How do you know you are sane? Does anyone have a perfect body? Is one born or made a woman? In this class, we will read short selections from classic works of critical theory concerning how we encounter, understand, and make meaning in the world. These works belong to a tradition of reading and writing, interpretation and agitation from which the discipline of media studies emerged in the late twentieth century. Our job as a class is to use this tradition to interrogate three vectors of power that shape our daily lives: race, health, and gender. To that end, the course is split in half. Each week, we will dedicate one class meeting to reading and discussing a work of theory. Our second meeting will be dedicated to a communal research and production project that centers the intersections of race, health, and gender. The goal is for our media practice to inform and be informed by our encounters with theory.
American Epidemics (INT 198, T/TR 2:00-3:20, Fall 2024)
From colonial ailments to global pandemics, disease has shaped the United States. Beginning with the metaphor of “invisible bullets” that the Algonquin peoples of the Chesapeake Bay used to describe settler colonial diseases, the class will trace patterns of racial formation and national belonging through epidemics. Students will learn to approach illness as an object of humanistic inquiry, and examine intersectional questions of race, gender, colonial power, economic privilege and social status through medical history. We will find strategies for critiquing and comprehending the inequities and anxieties of the post-pandemic present through the history and literature of biological crisis in America.
Office
Meneely 115
Hours
Fall 2024: Wednesday 12:00-2:00 pm
Spring 2025: Monday/Wednesday 11:00am - 12:00pm
and by appointment