About Lorenzo
M.P.H. PhD, Director of the Health, Medicine and Society Program, Lehigh University
Lorenzo Servitje is associate professor of literature and medicine, with a dual appointment in the Department of English and the Health, Medicine, and Society program at Lehigh University which he currently directs. He holds a PhD in English from the University of California Riverside and a Master in Public Health at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine. Servitje’s research and teaching interests include the history and literature of science and medicine. He regularly teaches “How Literature Made Medicine Popular,” “Health and Medical Humanities,” and classes in Victorian literature.
About Gillian
PhD Candidate in English at Lehigh University
Gillian Anderson is a Ph.D. Candidate in English at Lehigh University and a graduate research affiliate for the Health, Medicine, and Society (HMS) department. She is the co-author of The Charlotte Smith Story Map, published at Romantic Circles, with Beth Dolan, as well as the co author of a chapter in The Routledge Handbook of Health and Media. She has taught a range of HMS undergraduate classes, and attended Yale’s Sherwin B. Nuland Institute of Bioethics. Her research focuses on health humanities and horror studies, and she is currently writing her dissertation, “Haunting Health: Disease, the Horror Genre, and Health Rhetoric.”
About their project
The Time and Space of Antibiotic History and Resistance
“The Time and Space of Antibiotic History and Resistance” brings together ArcGIS mapping and digital timeline creation to explore the history of antibiotics and resistance. While there is extant work in the history of medicine, most cited biomedical literature on antimicrobial resistance (AMR) does not engage with the histography in detail—leaving the methodology behind selecting their dates and events unclear. This project will create a repository for researchers to explore (and cite) the complex history of antibiotics and AMR, both geographically and temporally, with the aim of then expanding this project to have a public facing version. We will analyze how academics have determined key dates in antibiotic history, and ultimately ask how we can utilize this temporal grounding to educate users about the precarity of antibiotics and the looming public health crisis of AMR, which may kill 10 million people per year by 2050 (Murray et al. 630).