The Plymouth State University (PSU) Saul O Sidore Lecture Series, focused this year on understanding and responding to social disruptions, will present “Before Anti-Autism: Cow Mania and the Vaccination Debates” on Friday, September 24, at 7 p.m., featuring Travis Chi Wing Lau, Ph.D. The lecture will be held in-person at PSU and virtually via Zoom, and is free and open to the public.

PLYMOUTH – The Plymouth State University Saul O Sidore Lecture Series, focused this year on understanding and responding to social disruptions, will present “Before Anti-Autism: Cow Mania and the Vaccination Debates” on Friday, September 24, at 7 p.m., featuring Travis Chi Wing Lau, Ph.D.

Dr. Lau will make the case that much of the current anti-vaccination discourse draws its rhetoric and affective strategies from long-standing ableist anxieties surrounding “cow mania,” a condition associated with the violation of species boundaries and class tensions. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there was heavy outcry in Britain over Edward Jenner’s campaigns to nationalize vaccination. Opponents of the vaccination, like Benjamin Moseley and William Rowley, decried it as a violent, dangerous procedure that corrupts mankind, especially children, by reducing them to a bovine state.

Lau is an assistant professor of English at Kenyon College in Ohio. He received his bachelor’s degree in English with a minor in classical civilization from the University of California, Los Angeles, and his master’s and Ph.D. degrees in English from the University of Pennsylvania. His work is primarily focused on eighteenth- and nineteenth- century British literature and culture with research and teaching interests in literature and science, the history of medicine and disability studies.

The Saul O Sidore Lecture Series is free and open to the public and will take place in the Smith Recital Hall, Reception Room 130, and virtually via Zoom at go.plymouth.edu/sidore.

There will be an opportunity for questions following the lecture.

Named for humanitarian and New Hampshire businessman Saul O Sidore, the lecture series brings a variety of speakers to PSU to address critical issues and events in politics, society and culture, topics that reflect Sidore’s interests. For more information visit: https://campus.plymouth.edu/sidore/.