Faculty Snapshot: Rachel Adams
Tell us a bit about your work.
My recent work is about disability justice, medical humanities, and the sciences in cultural context. My area of literary expertise is 20th and 21st-century American literature. I just published a book on the crisis of care and the remarkable fund of knowledge about interdependency possessed by dependent people and those who care for them called Love, Money Duty: Stories of Care in Our Time. I'm teaching two extremely fun seminars this semester: Comics, Health, and Embodiment and Lab Lit, Weird Science, and Speculative Fiction.
Tell us about a book that you have read recently and would recommend.
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our World by Merlin Sheldrake. I have not been able to stop thinking about this book since I read it a few months ago. Adopting a fungal point of view prompts us to rethink individuality, interdependency, and how life works; Sheldrake also shows how fungi are at the center of remarkably innovative technologies for living more sustainably.
What advice might you have for a potential mentee about how to succeed in academia?
Follow your curiosity and your passions; create rituals that help you get your work done and preserve them at all costs; and never stop learning new things. Make sure you have a restorative activity: maybe an exercise you enjoy, a creative practice, supportive friendships. If you don't love your work you should do something else because there are many other things to do in life that are better paying and easier.
Are you currently looking for collaborators? If so, what types of collaborations are you seeking?
Yes I am! I am a humanist with immense science curiosity, and have been taking undergraduate science classes for almost ten years now. I love getting to know my STEM colleagues at Columbia, learning from them, and looking for innovative ways we can collaborate. I am especially interested in bioart and biocultures, genetics, and the history of science.
To learn more about Dr. Adam's work, please visit her personal website.