EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION There is a sense of urgency about the essays in this, the third issue of FrameWorks: A Journal of Undergraduate Research in the Interdisciplinary Humanities. It is hardly surprising, given the times we live in and the theme we asked our undergraduate researchers to address: this is the “Immunity Edition.” Our 2021-2022 cohort of FrameWorks Fellows thereby took on a complex task. Consider the journey the idea of “immunity” has been on in the public understanding over the past few years. Before COVID-19 made us pay closer attention, many of us may have understood “immunity” to suggest a state of impermeability or invulnerability. News cycles have since clarified that immunity can wax and wane and that viruses mutate again and again. With even fully vaccinated and boosted individuals susceptible to breakthrough infections, the idea that we can be fully immune now seems naïve. In addition, the legal and moral connotations of “immunity” (etymologically speaking, they predate the biomedical usage) have also received their share of airtime in the political and social tumult of the last few years. Because the idea of “immunity” is something of a moving target, our Fellows had to approached it with discipline and ingenuity. Each of the articles contained in this issue uses immunity as a critical frame for careful, deliberative reflection. The result is a volume of undergraduate research and writing that speaks to the value of the interdisciplinary humanities: they offer us space and structure to slow down, to gather up our ideas and impressions, to organize our thoughts, and to do our best to understand world and our place in it in all its careening complexity. For obvious reasons, the pandemic inflects much of the work that is printed here, with several articles addressing its social and cultural implications. Sarah Gawlik reads Oedipus Tyrannos to better understand the epistemological stakes arising from a collective crisis of biological immunity. Saamiya Syed questions the idea that we live in “unprecedented times” by considering the 1793 Yellow Fever epidemic in Philadelphia as a microcosm of the present. Guadalupe Lombera argues that Paula Mendoza’s Immigrants are Essential installations – memorials to undocumented essential workers who died during the pandemic – serve as a critique of anti-immigrant rhetoric that seeks to “immune” the United States from “foreign pathogens.” 7
8 Publizr Home