Cristina
M.
Visperas
Cristina
M.
Visperas
Tabs
Cristina Visperas researches the cultural politics of science and medicine, with a focus on race and state/state-sanctioned violence. Drawing on her science background, she examines how the work of experts can reproduce social hierarchies and, conversely, how they can be mobilized for the ends of justice and social good. Her book, Skin Theory: Visual Culture and the Postwar Prison Laboratory (NYU Press), is an abolitionist study of postwar medical science experiments conducted in US prisons and the emergence of modern American bioethics. Her next project analyzes the complicated relationship between emotion and scientific knowledge in the context of accelerating climate and public health catastrophes.
She currently sits on the editorial board of Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience and is affiliated with the Center on Science, Technology, and Public Life.
Awards and honors:
Finalist, Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize (2023)
Honorable Mention, Rachel Carson Book Prize, Society for the Social Studies of Science (2023)
Books
Skin Theory: Visual Culture and the Postwar Prison Laboratory (2022, NYU Press).
Journal Articles
“The Body of Prison Power” (2024, Visual Studies).
“The Able-Bodied Slave” (2019, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies).
“Nothing/More: Black Studies and Feminist Technoscience,” co-editor (2016, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience).
“African Kaposi’s Sarcoma in the Light of Global AIDS: Antiblackness and Viral Visibility,” co-author (2014, Journal of Bioethical Inquiry).
“Chicken Embryonic Brain: An In-Vivo Model for Verifying Neural Stem Cell Potency,” co-author (2013, Journal of Neurosurgery).
Media Coverage
Courses
COMM 206: Communication and Culture
COMM 451: Visual Communication and Social Change
COMM 476: Crisis and Culture: The Anthropocene
COMM 649: Methodologies in Cultural Studies
GESM 131g: Science Communication in a Post-Truth Era