Osmundson writes with the disarming voice of that teacher who makes science cool, even radical. His thought is discursive, his questioning accretive. He contains—and covers—multitudes: How are white people to stop spreading the lethal disease of “whiteness”? How does capitalism limit the imagination? Is evolution quintessentially queer? The task of following his leaps and swerves, while occasionally challenging, is its own reward, a chance to collaborate with a mind at work.—John Okrent, New York Times Book Review

Virology is a brilliant book, both playful and serious, showing us all how viruses live with us, as we live with them. Drawing on queer theory, Osmundson offers a way of understanding care in the midst of anguish and anxiety as well as desire and hope. The viral world is the ordinary world of life and death, of caring for one another in our vulnerability and persistence. This book explains the science of virology for our times, offering a compassionate education for all of us disoriented in pandemic times. This book is queer pedagogy at its best: non-patronizing, thoroughly smart, and full of urgent and caring knowledge that beckons us to get closer again with caution and passion.—Judith Butler

Joe Osmundson’s Virology is an incisive look at our relationship to earth’s most plentiful life form—how we live with viruses and how viruses live in and through us. But more than this, it is a compelling examination of the tension between avoidance and exposure, safety and risk, preservation of the self and openness to evolution and change. This book is a potent medicine for our times.—Lacy M. Johnson, author of The Reckonings