Ghost Maps: Visualizing Disease Narratives was a team-taught, cross-listed English course offered in the fall 2021 semester that blended ENG 313: Writing About Science, Medicine, and the Environment and ENG 390: Studies in Literature. Using the 19th-century cholera epidemic as a touchstone, the course focused on disease’s literary, rhetorical, and visual dimensions. Together, Profs. Katie Peel and Jeremy Tirrell and their students explored the role of narrative in disease—in case studies, rhetoric, ideology and literature—and vice versa, and wrestled with questions such as: How do we use narrative to understand and speak of disease? How does medical discourse shape our understandings? What does this tell us about the given culture, and how might this help us read texts historically and in the light of our current pandemic era?
As part of the course, students worked together in groups to research a local public health issue and to create a map and accompanying presentation that presented their findings.