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Events
Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
Jun. 30 | 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
Oct. 1 | Travel Grants for Graduate Students
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Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Wisecup, Kelly . "Communicating Disease: Medical Knowledge and Literary Forms in Colonial British America," English, University of Maryland, College Park, June 2009. Advisor: Ralph Bauer
This dissertation examines the ways in which colonial encounters among Native, African, and European medical philosophies contributed to the formation and transformation of colonial rhetorical strategies. In particular, I show that colonists adapted rhetorical strategies from England to present empirical medical knowledge from the New World as trustworthy. Drawing upon ethnohistorical, anthropological, and historical research, the dissertation locates the development of early American literatures in an intercultural, as well as a transatlantic context, showing that encounters with Native and African medical knowledge inspired British Americans to adapt familiar rhetorical strategies, from the true relation, providence tale, and plain style to satires and georgic poems, to the New World. Colonists throughout the British Americas incorporated non-European medical philosophies, replacing Old World subject matter with knowledge from colonial encounters. They presented non-European medical knowledge both as empirical and trustworthy and as witchcraft and irrational, in this way distancing themselves from colonial encounters and authorizing medical knowledge produced in the colonies. Ultimately, early Americans’ incorporation and subordination of non-European medical philosophies authorized colonial medical knowledge as empirical and rational and constructed conceptions of cultural differences between colonists, Native Americans, and Africans.
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