Karla FC Holloway

In residence Spring 2008

Professor of English and of Law

Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

Address: 104 Mt. Auburn Street, Floor 3R

Telephone:  617.496.4122

Email: khollow@fas.harvard.edu

Biography

Karla FC Holloway, Ph.D., M.L.S., is the Arts and Sciences Professor of English at Duke University. She also holds appointments in the Law School and in two interdisciplinary programs—Women’s Studies and African and African American Studies. Her research and teaching focus on African American cultural studies, biocultural studies, ethics, and law. Her board memberships, including the Greenwall Foundation’s Advisory Board in Bioethics, Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, and Princeton University’s Advisory Council: Program in the Study of Women and Gender, reflect her scholarly interests. She is the author of more than thirty essays including “Cruel Enough to Stop the Blood: Global Feminisms and the U.S. Body Politic, or: ‘They Done Taken My Blues and Gone’” (Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism 7:1), and “Accidental Communities: Race, Emergency Medicine and the Problem of Polyheme” in The American Journal of Bioethics 6:3. Professor Holloway is the author of six books, most recently Passed On: African-American Mourning Stories and BookMarks--Reading in Black and White, A Memoir. She has won numerous national awards and foundation fellowships recognizing her scholarship, most recently the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Residency Fellowship. Professor Holloway’s public essays on race, ethics, and culture appear frequently on National Public Radio.

Project

“Private Bodies/Public Texts: Bioethics and Literature”

Private Bodies/Public Texts is a book length series of essays that explore contemporary issues in bioethics from the space of fiction. The organization of my project illustrates the books’ argument that literary studies can both assist and inform our public discussions of twenty-first century identities—those bodies that are the subjects of bioethics’ inquiry. At the heart of these essays is my argument that race and gender, as noticed within the law, are implicated in some of the most complex issues in bioethics—reproduction, DNA, right-to-die, and clinical trials—even as these embodied complexities are simplified into notions of “identity” and “community” in public discussions of medical practice, scientific inquiry, and legal status. Private Bodies illustrates how literature’s creative engagements with difference mediate the very subjects in bioethics that have led to such significant debates in public fora. My goal is to indicate how a focus on narrative fiction might help center otherwise unwieldy discussions of race and gender in bioethics regarding a body’s privacy.