Saugatuck Scribes: 'Unvaccinated Under God' by Kira Ganga Kieffer
Event Details
As part of our Saugatuck Scribes series spotlighting Westport authors, Kira Ganga Kieffer joins us for an intriguing discussion of her new book, Unvaccinated Under God: Religion and Vaccine Hesitancy in Modern America.
About Unvaccinated Under God
Vaccine hesitancy in America didn’t begin with the uproar over the mRNA vaccines for Covid-19. The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries saw resistance to a wide variety of vaccines. In her new book, Kira Ganga Kieffer shows that debates over vaccine safety and mandatory vaccination were about more than diseases or injections. They have been proxies for existential concerns about justice and morality. Kieffer argues that vaccine hesitancy in the U.S. should be understood as religious expression — not as the product of scientific misinformation.
About the Author
Kira Ganga Kieffer is a scholar of American religions, history, culture, and politics with a PhD in Religious Studies from Boston University. After graduating magna cum laude with Honors in Religion and History from Brown University in 2008, she spent six years working in marketing in the New York area before returning to academia. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Fairfield University.
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