Still from Kyasanur Forest Disease (dir. Telford Work, 1956)

My current monograph, tentatively entitled Contagious Racialization: Asian Americans, Epidemiology, and the Culture of Disease, explores why Asian Americans are hypervisible in the discourses of certain diseases, while being almost completely absent from the discourse of others. Despite the durability of the racial trope of the “contagious Asian” across the 20th and 21st century, Asian Americans do not uniformly stand in for the many diseases that intersect with modern life. I ask how an accounting of Asian American racial form that takes contagion as one of its foundational pillars might address questions of racial embodiment and community relationality for Asian Americans from the Cold War through the present day. Rather than reading an association with contagion as only symptomatic of racism and xenophobia, I examine how a sense of one’s race as contagious has been incorporated into Asian American cultural life through literature, film, and scientific media.