As part of the Willson Center's distinguished lecturer series, Dr. Rosemary Jolly will give a talk titled "Effluence in Disease: Ebola and HIV as Case Studies of Debility in the Postcolonial State.”

Dr. Jolly is Weiss Chair of the Humanities in Literature and Human Rights at Penn State. Her work is concerned with the ways in which representations of violence and reconciliation actually affect inter-governmental, inter-community and inter-personal relations in contexts of conflict. She explores the links between living conditions of extreme deprivation, gender-based violence and coercion, and the HIV pandemic. She has worked with victim-survivors of state sponsored torture, gender-based violence, and communities fractured by illness globally and is particularly concerned with the ethics of working with highly vulnerable communities in research and development.

She has published in the fields of South African literature and culture, postcolonial theory, and the critical medical humanities.  Her work has involved mixed quantitative and qualitative methodologies.  She is particularly experienced in qualitative analysis of oral testimony and tools of qualitative research that involve embodied gesture in addition to conventional verbalization.

This lecture is sponsored by the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, the African Studies Institute, and the Department of Comparative Literature.