Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle has been read as a critique of unfettered capitalism in the urban space of Chicago at the beginning of the twentieth century. This essay argues that this capitalist critique may gain further depth when read through the intersection between transnational American studies and medical humanities. Through the perspective of the Lithuanian character Jurgis Rudkus, the narrative turns on its head xenophobic claims of immigrants as a health menace to the US American nation. In so doing, it engages the field of medicine in two significant ways. It counters the claim that immigrants have no knowledge of hygiene by looking at white tables through immigrant eyes; and it critiques the fact that the US medical system has become inhumane in its increasing economization. Reading Sinclair’s novel in dialogue with historical studies of migration and contagion at the beginning of the twentieth century as well as with other naturalistic texts such as Frank Norris’s The Octopus, I suggest that The Jungle anticipates current debates about health care and health justice, as they have recently been addressed in Barack Obama’s autobiography A Promised Land.

Excerpt from Developing Transnational American Studies, edited by Nadja Gernalzick and Heike C. Spickermann

In this thesis we primarily focus on the interplay between Floer homology and Hamiltonian dynamics. This has been an active area of research since the late 1980s with the introduction of pseudo-holomorphic curves by Gromov and Floer homology by Floer. The Floer Homology has been a very powerful tool to study dynamics on a symplectic or contact manifold and the subject is very broad.

Here primarily we concentrate on three aspects of the connections of Floer Homology and dynamics. Firstly, the connection between Hamiltonian dynamics and symplectic topology of the underlying manifold by studying special kind of Hamiltonians such as toric pseudo-rotations. We further study two Floer-theoretic invariants of symplectic and contact dynamics: ``barcode entropy'' and symplectic capacities. We use these invariants to understand various Hamiltonian dynamics behaviors such as pseudo-rotations (Hamiltonians with finitely many orbits) or other extremes (Hamiltonians with infinitely many orbits or very chaotic dynamics).

The U.S. Supreme Court ruling in United Automobile Workers versus Johnson Controls prohibits hiring policies that exclude fertile women from industries posing reproductive health risks to workers and fetuses. Many toxic substances that threaten the developing fetus also pose risks to adult male and female workers. Exclusionary employment policies are socially undesirable for the following reasons: they may lead to worse reproductive outcomes if the indirect effects of lower wages and less adequate health insurance in the alternative available jobs are considered. Second, the effect of such policies could damage the individual woman's overall well-being through its economic impact and her potential loss in autonomy. Third, occupational segregation into less hazardous but lower-paying jobs reinforces gender stereotypes that are restrictive to women. The Supreme Court ruling in the Johnson Controls case reaffirms the importance of the Civil Rights Act as both a shield against unfair treatment for individual women and a commitment to eradicate sexist attitudes and economic inequality throughout society.