Silva, Cristobal
Kaplan 182
Tel: 310.825.4173 / Fax: 310.267.4339 / E-mail
Ph.D. New York University (English), 2003
B.A. UC Berkeley (English and Mathematics), 1992
Cristobal Silva is an Associate Professor and currently serves as the director of Career Development and Placement in the Department of English at UCLA. He is the author of Miraculous Plagues: An Epidemiology of Early New England Narrative (Oxford, 2011), a book that frames early American legal, theological, and literary history in relation to experiences of epidemic and contagion in the first century after Anglo-Puritan settlement. He is a former editor of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, and one of the co-editors of Digital Grainger, an online edition of James Grainger’s The Sugar-Cane (1764). He is currently writing two books. The first, titled “Republic of Medicine,” considers the emergence of modern medicine and literary history alongside the Atlantic Slave Trade. The second, titled “How to Name a Plague,” is a meditation on modern geopolitics, environmental contamination, health policy, and caregiving practices.
His teaching interests include Colonial American, Caribbean, and Early Black Atlantic Literatures as well as the Medical Humanities and Graphic Medicine. Recent courses he has taught include Engl. 11 (Introduction to American Literature and Culture), Engl 135 (Voices of the Early Black Atlantic), Engl. 166A and B (Surveys of Early American Literature), Engl 184 (Graphic Medicine; Phillis Wheatley and her World), and Engl 254 (Forms of New World Narrative).
Interest Areas
• African American Literature & Culture / Black Diaspora Studies
• American Literature & Culture
• Disability Studies
• Eighteenth-C. British Literature
• Medical and Health Humanities
• Native American and Indigenous Studies
• Transatlantic Studies
• History of Science