FHI | "Pandemic Genres": A Conversation with Neville Hoad

To commemorate World AIDS Day 2025, the FHI will host Neville Hoad for a lecture on his recent book, "Pandemic Genres: Imagining Politics in a Time of AIDS" (California, 2025), and a conversation with Chris Beyrer and Courtney Klashman.

As HIV/AIDS emerged as a public health crisis of significant proportions across sub-Saharan Africa, it became the subject of local and international interest that was at once prurient, benevolent, and interventionist. Meanwhile, the experience of Africans living with HIV/AIDS became an object of aesthetic representation in multiple genres produced by Africans themselves. These cultural representations engaged public discourse-the public policy pronouncements of officials of postcolonial states, an emerging global NGO-speak, and journalism.

In Pandemic Genres, Neville Hoad investigates how novels, poems, and films around the pandemic supplemented public discourse. He shows that historical imaginaries of race, empire, and sex in Botswana, Kenya, and South Africa underwrote attempts to bring the pandemic into public representation. Attention to genres that stage themselves as imaginary, particularly on the terrain of feeling, may forecast possibilities for new figurations.

Neville Hoad is co-director of Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice at The University of Texas at Austin School of Law, and Associate Professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies. He is the author of Pandemic Genres; Imagining Politics in a Time of AIDS (California, 2025) and African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality and Globalization (Minnesota 2007); and co-editor (with Karen Engle) of Hierarchies of Work: Race, World-Systems, and Legal Distribution (Columbia, 2025) and (with Karen Martin and Graeme Reid) of Sex & Politics in South Africa: Equality/Gay & Lesbian Movement/the anti-Apartheid Struggle (Double Storey 2005).

Chris Beyrer, MD, MPH is the Gary Hock Distinguished Professor of Global Infectious Diseases at Duke University, Director of the Duke Global Health Institute and Associate Director for Global HIV at the Duke Center for AIDS Research. Prior to coming to Duke in 2022, Dr. Beyrer was the Desmond M. Tutu Professor at Johns Hopkins University and Professor of Epidemiology and Medicine from 1997-2022.

Courtney Klashman is a PhD candidate in English, and pursuing a certificate in AAAS at Duke University.

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