Contagion became a key term in the field of modern cultural studies. The emergence as a keyword at the turn of the twenty-first century opened divers horizons of the transdisciplinary field of studies, not limited to cultural studies, such as financial and emotional contagion. Indeed, the epidemiological model was spreading through many cultural theories. From 1990, epistemological discussion of Dawkins' meme theory displaced from genetic analogies to epidemiological ones. Cultural studies were already showing signs of having caught the contagion infection in the same period, but from the early 2000s, a salient, interdisciplinary cultural studies of contagion emerged. With some exemplary studies of the domain, contagion is not purely epidemiological fact but also a foundational concept in the cultural theories, with a long history of explaining how beliefs and desires spread in social interactions. However, the paradigm of contagion evolved through the twentieth century's French cultural theories such as Gabriel Tarde, Ren Girard, and Dan Sperber. In this paper, I attempted to reconstruct this genealogy of contagion discourses which have influenced the domain of contemporary cultural theories.
