Annika Mann

Annika Mann is a scholar of eighteenth-century and Romantic-era British literature and culture, with special interests in the history of medicine, the health humanities, and disability studies. Her book Reading Contagion: The Hazards of Reading in the Age of Print (University of Virginia Press, 2018) explores how reading was marked as a fundamentally contagious, collectivizing activity in medical texts and literary works published during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Her co-edited collection, Transforming Contagion, with ASU colleagues Breanne Fahs, Eric Swank and Sarah Stage, examines contagion from both social sciences and humanities perspectives, by excavating infectious practices rooted in social movements, film, literature, psychological exchanges, the classroom and more. Dr. Mann is currently working on a project on literature’s supposedly special relationship to health during the Romantic period, with particular focus on how women write chronic pain and immobility. Articles and chapters by Dr. Mann have appeared in Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the volume Systems of Life (eds. Montag and Barney) and are forthcoming in SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 and the volume Keywords for the Health Humanities (eds. Altschuler, Metzl, and Wald).