Libraries: What if Cancer Turns to Creative Research? A Special Topic Guide: Home

About

Dr. Caro Novella is ETSU's Spring 2024 Basler Chair of Excellence for the Integration of the Arts, Rhetoric, and Sciences. She has published work in both the English and Spanish languages in journals like Performance Review, and TDR: The Drama Review. This guide includes a list of book recommendations which contains memoirs, research, and textbooks on cancer, medicine, disability, and the arts.

Books and Articles Authored by Dr. Novella

Arousing Formlessness: Collaborative encounters with chemotherapy This article engages with the affective charge of being under the influence of chemotherapy for the first time; with a performance piece, Ero(chem)ica, emerging from this experience; and with chemo-relations as rehearsal spaces arousing formlessness. Indexing the disjointed intensity of luring text/ures, the performance and this piece, aim to attune the audience into new pharmacoerotic assemblages. To open, through eroticism, more possibilities of existence.
From Consent to Cosense: Rehearsing Ecologies of Exposure within Quimera Rosa’s Trans*Plant, my disease is an artistic creation In Spanish, the etymology of the word ‘rehearsal’ [ensayo] holds together the clinic (as in clinical testing), processes of knowledge making (as in trial and error), and the arts. What follows is a collection of rehearsal moments in the process of making a performance. Within Quimera Rosa’s Trans*plant, my disease is an artistic creation and in collaboration with artists and students at UC Davis, the question is: can rehearsal change the clinic sensorium? Science protocols and performance scores mingle with accounts of the many things happening1 in rehearsal. Emerging within documentation and practice, this essay attends particularly to how we tangled in the tempos and relationalities of a bio wet lab, while developing a mode of being in rehearsal that moved us from an ecology of (immune) consent to an ecology of (exposed) co-sense.
Posología, Microdosis transfeministas para la salud A spanish language book co-authored by Dr. Novella
Scoring Enquiry, Unsettling Ignorance: Moving with racialized cancer uncertainties
What are we waiting for? Rehearsal as Arousal Politice in Oncogrrrls Current debates in the field of socially engaged art dwell on the relational versus antagonist potentiality of performance for social change, while disability scholars and cancer activists call for performance that activates relationalities beyond individual/medical models. oncogrrrls proposes rehearsal as a liquid space for the joint creation of new cancer relations.