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Rachel Conrad Bracken
Rachel Conrad Bracken is Assistant Professor of Family and Community Medicine at Northeast Ohio Medical University. She received her PhD in literature from Rice University in Houston, Texas, where she was a graduate certificate student with the Center for Critical and Cultural Theory, the Center for Teaching Excellence, and the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. As a scholar of American literature and the health humanities, Bracken explores the intersections of American literature and public health history from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her work also engages with contemporary debates over big data in healthcare and the rhetoric surrounding pediatric vaccination, illuminating the profound role that cultural forms—including literature, popular media, and the internet—play in shaping community values and culturally-specific conceptions of “health” and “illness.” Bracken’s research appears or is forthcoming in Hektoen International: A Journal of Medical Humanities, Big Data and Society, English Language Notes (ELN), and the collection Transforming Contagion: Risky Contacts among Bodies, Disciplines, and Nations (Rutgers UP, 2018). She teaches courses in literature and medicine, gender and health, and “speculative bioethics” in science fiction.