Susan Zieger, a candidate for the Ph.D. in the Department of English, argues in Literary and Medical Concepts of Addiction in Britain, 1848-190” that addiction is not a transhistorical medial phenomenon, but contains within it a particular history of discursive formation: that in the latter half of the nineteenth century in Britain, addiction emerges as the primary example of a new disease of modern life, marking those who become the “other” of the liberal subject because they can neither command their desires nor represent them straightforwardly. Zieger’s project relates the formal and rhetorical strategies of medical and popular accounts of addiction to the fragmented narration in novels by Ann Bronte, Wilkie Collins, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Bram Stoker. Susan Zieger is the Marian E. Koshland Fellow at the Townsend Center.