Zoomcast with Lorenzo Servitje
Zoomcast Production Details
Zoomcast Overview
This Zoomcast continues the series on positionality in a field that desperately needs undisciplining and in a historical moment that requires undisciplined approaches to teaching and research. Ryan D. Fong interviews Lorenzo Servitje, Associate Professor of Literature and Medicine at Lehigh University. Their conversation focuses Servitje’s entry into the field and his deep commitment to interdisciplinary scholarship, particularly within the medical humanities. Servitje not only discusses his recent book, but his decision to earn a second graduate degree, a Master of Public Health, to enhance his teaching and research. They talk about the way this study and research informs Servitje’s teaching of Victorian literature and culture, which is often to students from outside the English major, and the deep relevance that his conversations with natural and social scientists has to making connections between the nineteenth century and our own moment amidst the COVID pandemic.
Positionality Series
This cluster of Zoomcasts begins with our journeys as scholars initially trained in a national literature that has been integral to producing fantasies of white British superiority and, more importantly, why we advocate to “undiscipline” Victorian studies as a way to inspire new modes of antiracist teaching in our classroom spaces. Because these reflections come from our personal experiences, we don't intend to speak on behalf of others and are sharing from the position of our own identities, bodies, institutional locations, and backgrounds as a way to spark thought and discussion.
Guest Biography
Lorenzo Servitje is Associate Professor of Literature and Medicine, with a dual appointment in the Department of English and the Health, Medicine, and Society program at Lehigh University. He holds a PhD in English from the University of California, Riverside and is currently completing a Master of Public Health at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine. His monograph Medicine Is War: The Martial Metaphor in Victorian Literature and Culture (SUNY UP, 2021) traces the metaphorical militarization of medicine in the nineteenth century. His current book project, The Science and Fiction of Antibiosis examines the history and culture of antibiotics and antibiotic resistance. He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Medical Humanities and as an associate editor for Literature and Medicine. He is co-lead editor of the “Studies in Health Humanities” book series from Lehigh University Press.
Page/Zoomcast Citation (MLA)
“Zoomcast with Lorenzo Servitje.” Ryan D. Fong, host. Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom, 2022, https://undiscipliningvc.org/html/zoomcasts/servitje.html.