University Professor
dbm6e@virginia.edu
David Morris is a writer and scholar. He began teaching at the University of Virginia in 1969, spent twenty years from 1982 to 2002 as a self-employed writer, and in 2002 he rejoined the faculty at the University of Virginia as a University Professor. This interdisciplinary appointment allows him to serve in both the Department of English and the Center for Bioethics and Humanities.
He has a checkered past. As a scholar of British literature, he published numerous essays and two prize-winning books-The Religious Sublime (1972) and Alexander Pope: The Genius of Sense (1984)-before resigning a professorship at the University of Iowa in order to write full time. The Culture of Pain (1991) won a PEN prize and has been translated into German, Spanish, and Japanese. He has lectured and written for a wide variety of audiences, including an award-winning article in Arthritis Today; he is past Associate Editor of the journal Literature and Medicine; presently he is Associate Editor of the Journal of Medical Humanities and Associate Editor of the journal New Literary History. At NLH he is currently preparing (with co- editor and disability-studies specialist Lennard J. Davis) a special issue on "biocultures." The special issue will include his most recent essay, "Eros and Illness: Un-Forgetting Asclepius."
Among other activities, his book Earth Warrior (1995) describes the voyage he took with environmental activist Captain Paul Watson on a ship-ramming, anti-driftnet campaign in the North Pacific. His most recent book, Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age (1998), translated into German, Spanish, and Portuguese, describes a new understanding of illness as created at the crossroads of biology and culture. He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Science Foundation. He has held the Carruthers Distinguished Visiting Professorship at the University of New Mexico as well as the inaugural Fellowship in Medical Humanities at Stanford University. He lives in Charlottesville with his wife, Ruth, and their cat, Pounce.