Elena Fratto is Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. Her research focuses on the Health and Environmental Humanities and theories of narrative. She is the author of Medical Storyworlds: Health, Illness, and Bodies in Russian and European Literature at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Columbia University Press, 2021), and co-editor of Russian Literature of the Anthropocene (2020) and other special journal issues. She has also published on Russian Formalism, and science, literature, and the visual arts in Russophone and culture of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. Fratto is a faculty associate of the Health Language Lab, a project housed at Columbia University in partnership with the Center for Disease Control, in which she co-leads a project that examines recurring imagery and language employed by covid-19 vaccine hesitant communities to describe vaccines and vaccination.