Education—Scholarship

A collection created by the Content Development Group of the International Internet Preservation Consortium in collaboration with Archive-It to preserve web content related to the ongoing Novel Coronavirus (Covid-19) outbreak. Identification of seed websites and initial web crawling began in February 2020, and the collection will continue to add new content as needed during the course of the outbreak and its containment. High priority subtopics include: coronavirus origins; information about the spread of infection; regional or local containment efforts; medical and scientific aspects; social aspects; economic aspects; and political aspects. Websites from anywhere in the world and in any language are in scope.

In times of crisis, emotions seem more urgent than ever. The corona pandemic of 2020, the second true global crisis of the twenty-first century after the financial crash of 2008, has brought feelings to the fore: fear of contagion and for one’s own life, but also fear for others, even those we do not know personally. Other emotions that often emerge when social, political, or natural upheavals strike include solidarity and empathy, exhaustion and grief, hope and optimism. In contemporary discourse, feelings are both maligned for imbuing debates with "unnecessary" emotion and appreciated for offering a more individual perspectives. Emotions validate events and experience.

Feeling News has been created to engage with emotions as a day-to-day occurrence and their role in current events and incidents. Complementing our academic research portal “Insights into Research”, it provides brief, prompt, and essayistic analyses and viewpoints about the verbal and visual negotiations of emotions as they appear in everyday media coverage and beyond. Building on our Center’s core supposition that emotions have a history and that they make history, contributions may be historical or contemporary, but all flesh out the topicality of emotions for our present times and their historical aetiology.

The blog is run by the Center for the History of Emotions, but publication is open to all members of the public and contributions that adhere to the netiquette and formulate a concrete argument will be considered for publication.

CSEAS Corona Chronicles is a platform by the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University, which aims to present the latest research findings from different countries and regions on how COVID-19 is affecting individuals, communities, and nations and gauge their reactions.

Why this project now?

As the current Covid-19 pandemic has shown, human beings are confronted with devastating pandemics. This is true throughout the centuries. Reading about how people dealt with the horror and the trauma caused by pandemics in the past can help finding ways to tackle similar challenges in the 21st century.

The burgeoning printing industry of early modern Japan gave life to an impressive amount of books and ephemera that talk about different epidemics, including measles, smallpox and cholera. Yet, most of these materials are not available in transcription and are therefore accessible to a few specialists who can read the Japanese early modern cursive hand. This project trains a young generation of scholars to decode, read, and analyze such materials. It also makes resources in transcription available to students and scholars who have no training in palaeography.

Exploring the potential of artificial intelligence

Thanks to the collaboration with Prof Hashimoto Yuta, the project will reflect critically on the use of artificial intelligence as a tool to assist in the study of the palaeographic skills needed to read Japanese early modern materials. At the same time, the data generated by the project will be employed to further enhance the effectiveness of artificial intelligence.

2020

Join us in documenting our uncertain moment. We are acting not just as historians, but as chroniclers, recorders, memoirists, as image collectors. We invite you to share your stories about how the pandemic has affected our lives, from the mundane to the extraordinary, including the ways things haven't changed at all. Share your story  in text, images, video, tweets, texts, Facebook posts, Instagram or Snapchat memes, and screenshots of the news and emails--anything that speaks to paradoxes of the moment. Imagine, as we are, what future historian might need to write about and understand this historical moment. 

Crowdsourced collection of personal stories related to Covid-19

2020

CSEAS Corona Chronicles is a platform which aims to present the latest research findings from different countries and regions on how COVID-19 is affecting individuals, communities and nations and gauge their reactions.

Objectives

On 11 March, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared that an infectious disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS-CoV-2) had become a global pandemic. To date, 4.8 million people have been infected with other 322,000 confirmed dead (as of 20 May, 2020). CSEAS has been closely following the consequences of this unprecedented global event which has affected the lives and health of so many people.

In response to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Center for Southeast Asian Studies (CSEAS) has launched an online platform “Corona Chronicles: Voices from the Field” to collect and disseminate various perspectives and analysis from Southeast Asia and other regions. The Corona Chronicles provides comparative regional perspectives through a diversity of opinions and observations to present a unique insight into what is happening across regions and share knowledge and responses.

Coverage and Outcomes

Coverage is not limited to academic analysis and research. The platform also receives submissions from writers, filmmakers, journalists and medical and health care personnel. The site will also carry articles written anonymously due to political circumstances on the ground. Content will be regularly updated and available freely on line. 

Platform presenting the latest research findings from different countries and regions on the effects of COVID-19

2020

Archiving COVID-19 is a virtual exhibition of archival collections created by students in Georgetown University's HIST 129 (Modern South Asia) and HIST 224 (Women, Film and Indian History), offered during the spring semester of 2020 by Dr. Ananya Chakravarti.  As students of history, we created this archive of the present as a lasting record of an event of world historical importance.

Explore artifacts we have gathered by place of origin, shown on the map below, or scroll through individual collections. If you are interested in building your own archives, see our resources or contact Dr. Chakravarti. Latest blog posts can be found at the bottom of this page and we will continually update the site as our collections grow.  

Virtual exhibition of archival collections created by students at Georgetown University

2020

In March 2020, halfway through the semester at Georgetown, we found ourselves in the midst of an event of world-historical significance. The moment was frightening and filled with uncertainty. But it was also clear that what was happening and how people responded to it would provide important knowledge for the future. Four members of the class decided to interview people in the cities they were studying to create records of the pandemic from the local and individual perspective, which we called “pandemic oral histories.” Other participants used local data and news reports to create short “pandemic city snapshots” for their cities. Together, these reports provide a time capsule of March-May 2020 in fifteen cities around the world.

The oral history project was an optional assignment in place of a final paper for the class. Interviews were conducted over the internet with people the students knew well residing in the cities being studied. Interviewees were informed of the purpose of the interviews and gave their assent to publication. Full names were removed and transcripts edited to protect their privacy.

In the tradition of oral history and ethnography, the focus of these interviews was on understanding the interviewees’ personal experience and perceptions. Interviews were conducted in Chinese, Korean, and Hindi, then translated by the interviewers. In addition to the country and the city where they live, factors like the interviewees’ gender and social class, as well as occupation and household circumstances, all play a role in these interviews. Because of the critical role of both global and local communication amid the confusion of the pandemic, the interviews also discuss people’s sources of news and medical information.

We started these oral histories shortly after Georgetown University closed its campus to limit the spread of the coronavirus. At the time, there was no way to know what trend the virus would follow in each city. By chance, with the possible exception of Tehran, none of the cities studied by participants in the course this semester became a major pandemic hotspot during March-May, 2020. Instead, Georgetown itself turned out to be located in a region of uncontrolled transmission. On March 11, when the university announced that all classes were going online, the DC-Maryland-Virginia region had reported 34 cases and zero deaths. On May 15, the university’s commencement day, the cumulative totals for the region were 72,529 reported cases and 3,256 deaths.

Reported cases in Busan, Delhi, Kaohsiung, and Nanjing, the oral history sites, were relatively low during this period. Interviewees’ lives were nevertheless transformed by the pandemic, as the oral histories make clear.

Georgetown University oral history project: Reports that provide a time capsule of March-May 2020 in 15 cities around the world.

Translating Illness is an interdisciplinary research project created by Dr Marta Arnaldi, Laming Junior Research Fellow at The Queen’s College Oxford. The project consists of a programme of international collaborations and a series of seminars, podcasts and video conversations. Translating Illness has been inspired by Marta’s academic background in both literature and the medical sciences, and has been awarded funds from the Wellcome Institutional Strategic Support Fund (ISSF) and the John Fell Fund, Oxford, as well as by The Queen’s College.

Seminars, podcasts and video conversations

2020

In April 2020, LARB interviewed an international group of leading historians of public health, epidemics, and disaster science. Alex Langstaff (A. L.) asked them to reflect on how history is being used in coverage of COVID-19, and how they themselves are responding to the virus in their research, reading, and work life. Who gets to tell the story of epidemics? And more particularly, who gets to decide when an epidemic like COVID-19 ends? Is 1918 really the best parallel? In general, what are the historian’s tools for understanding pandemics?

• Alison Bashford, University of New South Wales Sydney
• Simukai Chigudu, University of Oxford
• Deborah Coen, Yale University
• Richard Keller, University of Wisconsin-Madison
• Julie Livingston, New York University
• Nayan Shah, University of Southern California
• Paul Weindling, Oxford Brookes University

Article by LA Review of Books

May 2020

Technology's Storytellers is a podcast developed by the Society for the History of Technology to explore present issues through the lens of the history of technology.

SHOT Podcast Series

2020

The COVID-19 Diaries is an academic and personal project, but more importantly an investment in a community space for those of us who might want to mix the professional and the personal and record these times. It does not matter if you want to record private thoughts, share feelings with other users, or open-up for the wider public view. Your journal can be private, for the group, or in the public eye. It does not have to be science based or personal, or anything for that matter (within reason). The crucial thing is that we have all interacted with Global Health and all have feelings and opinions,  We are in for the long haul and I know that many people will be interested in the human face of global health – our communication and our experience of this crisis could help others and we could help each other.

May 2020

The question is somewhere, somehow in everyone’s consciousness: how is it possible to live with loss, and with unknown, unimaginable changes in climate? Visualizing Climate and Loss is a platform for thinking with history about change, loss, and daily life -- and for thinking about what is to be done.

May 2020

Compiled by Eugene Raikhel

In an effort to highlight the vital perspectives of medical anthropology and neighboring disciplines, as well as to help manage the volume of material being published online, the Society for Medical Anthropology, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, and Somatosphere are collaborating to publish a weekly compilation of COVID-19-related materials across text, audio, and video formats. Each issue of “Medical anthropology weekly: COVID-19” will consist of a list of pieces published roughly over the past week, grouped thematically and including keywords for easy searching. In this first issue, we’ve also included a list of ongoing series and resource sites. Each issue will also be published on the SMA, MAQ, and Somatosphere sites and distributed over multiple channels.

May 2020

In response to the rapidly growing need for authoritative content related to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), ProQuest is launching a new Coronavirus Research Database, giving all ProQuest users no-cost access to full-text content covering all facets of COVID-19 and related infectious diseases.

The Coronavirus Research Database saves time and improves outcomes for researchers by aggregating authoritative content from ProQuest with content made available at no cost by members of the International Association of STM Publishers – including Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis and The BMJ. Journals, preprints, conference proceedings and dissertations provide comprehensive coverage of COVID-19 and other past coronavirus outbreaks, such as MERS and SARS, for context around the current global pandemic. Full-text content in the database is available either directly from ProQuest or via links to publisher sites.

March 2020

This resource document is divided into four sections. The first is responding directly to the question of "What are the covid testimonial and oral history projects happening within and for Asian American communities?; the second is related to one important strand of Asian Americans' experiences right now, specifically, hate crimes and anti-Asian racism; the third section really tries to bring together some disparate opportunities, events, or resources that may be of use and weave together Asian American organizing, cultural politics, storytelling and history; the last is a section trying to capture some of what I see as the key documentation and oral history projects happening more broadly around covid (not just impacting APIA folks but within NYC more generally or even much broader).

May 2020

As history organizations around the country adapt to the rapidly evolving COVID-19 outbreak and prepare to confront an uncertain future, AASLH will share resources and ideas from across the field through their Weekly Dispatch email newsletter and posting them on their blog.

April 2020

An article on plague history  by Alvin Finkel, Professor Emeritus of history at Athabasca University, Alberta, Canada. His latest book is Compassion: A Global History of Social Policy (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

Article on the historical context of Covid-19

April 23, 2020

EPIDEMIC is a twice-weekly podcast on public health and the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2 / COVID-19). Hear from some of the world’s leading infectious disease and public health experts. We’ll help you understand the latest science, the bigger context, and bring you diverse angles—from history and anthropology to politics and economics—depth and texture you won’t get elsewhere. Hosted by Dr. Celine Gounder, an infectious disease specialist and epidemiologist who has worked on tuberculosis and HIV in sub-Saharan Africa, and was an Ebola worker during the West African epidemic. And co-hosted by Ron Klain, the U.S. Ebola czar from 2014 to 2015. The COVID-19 pandemic may well be the defining moment of our times. Our lives have changed irrevocably. We need to understand the science so we can care for ourselves, our families, and our communities. And we need voices of reason to help us make sense of it all.

April 2020

Over five weeks in April and May, Platypus will release a piece each Thursday written by ethnographers who, for one reason or another, have been in the field through the COVID-19 pandemic. Each piece is part auto-ethnography, documenting the writers’ particular, personal experience with navigating the new landscape of a pandemic-affected field, and part ethnography, offering new insights into the landscape of the pandemic from the vantage point of their own, ongoing fieldwork.

The series will culminate in a recorded roundtable discussion that will highlight both the ways in which our fieldwork intervenes in conversations surrounding the pandemic, but also how the pandemic is becoming part of the practice of ethnography. It is our hope that this series will spark conversation about the place and boundaries of “the field” within a global pandemic, and the new relations that necessarily develop between ethnographer and a post-coronavirus field.

Platypus: The Castac Blog

April 2020

How does the current coronavirus pandemic affect people across the world? This website aims to be a repository of documentation evidencing the experience of COVID-19, with a particular focus on the role of digital technologies in responding to the crisis. It is sourced from students, researchers, healthcare workers, and indeed anyone who wishes to participate.

This resource can be used by anyone wishing to understand how people are using and repurposing social media, digital data and digital infrastructures, to respond to the rupture and reorganisation of everyday life during the current pandemic.

April 2020

A forum held at the American Philosophical Society on January 29, 2019, and continued online.

Join us to examine vaccine skepticism, in contemporary America, historically, and in the clinic. What are the historical roots of resistance to vaccination? What is the data about contemporary attitudes? How do these attitudes relate to changing social, economic and political contexts? How do these issues play out in the relationship between a doctor and a patient? Three experts will share their research and experience on these questions, and lead our discussion.

"Trust in Science: Vaccines" is the first event in a series inspired by Perceptions of Science in America, a report from the Public Face of Science Initiative at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Two more events later in the year will cover trust in science through evolution and climate change. This series is presented by the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine.

2020

"What do the humanities do in a time of crisis? We do what every profession does. We mobilize our communities, identify our areas of expertise, and find ways to work together for the collective good. We come together to envision a better future. And then we begin the work of making that future real."

Article by Hannah Alpert-Abrams

April 11, 2020

"I am used to waking up in the seventeenth century. As a historian of early modern science, that’s where I spend a lot of time. But it is strange that everyone else is suddenly keeping me company there.

No, I don’t mean the plague. Fortunately for us, Covid-19 is nowhere near as deadly as the diseases caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. From its arrival in Pisa in 1348 to the last great outbreak in Marseilles in 1720, the bacterium killed at least 30 percent of Europe’s population and probably a comparable number along its path from South Asia to the Middle East. That would translate to ninety-nine million deaths in the US alone. No one, not even the gloomiest epidemiologists, think Covid-19 will carry off almost a third of the world’s population."

Lorraine Daston in Critical Inquiry

April 10, 2020

Reported incidents of Asian American-targeted hate

Interactive map

April 2020

Imaginary letter to Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas).

Chinese food and history: blog post by Miranda Brown on Covid-19 and racism

April 9, 2020

This site publishes content on research related to COVID-19  from across the University of Edinburgh’s College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. It is hosted by a team led by the Edinburgh Centre for Medical Anthropology (EdCMA).

Covid-19 Perspectives

April 9, 2020

Current discussions about the Smart City and Living Lab indicate that Europe's planning culture will change fundamentally as a result of the corona virus.

Article by Sasha Roesler (in German)

April 3, 2020

Article in Boston Review by Alex de Waal

April 3, 2020

The Malawi Medical Humanities Network is committed to supporting pan-African studies in the interdisciplinary field of medicine which includes the humanities, social science, and the arts and their application to medical and health sciences.

By filling out this form, you are providing information to create a database of practitioners which will enable Malawi Medical Humanities Network to support initiatives and bring greater awareness and visibility to "who is doing what" in the field of medical humanities across the African continent.

Medical Humanities Database

April 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic reveals a vital-lethal entanglement of human and nonhuman bodies at a global scale. This post first draws attention on how different viral strains may interplay within and across species, both biologically and socially. The essay then considers the emerging multispecies viralscapes as a ‘wild’ planetary niche that binds bodies in ways for which technoscientific projects of domestication are obsolete.

Blog post by Allegra Laboratory

April 2020

The Netherlands are in lockdown to curb the covid-19 epidemic since prime minister Mark Rutte announced social distancing rules on 13 and 15 March. Since that time, various people have asked me, as a medical historian, ‘how we handled this kind of thing in the past’. By this they mean: how did people, both in the Netherlands and abroad, deal with epidemic respiratory infections in the past? The short answer would be: very different. The long answer could fill a book, but a blog post (or two) is written and read faster. This week part 1, on the history of our understanding of respiratory illnesses. Next week part 2, on treatments and management of respiratory illnesses.

Blog post by Marieke Hendriksen

March 31, 2020

"Does not this doubling, the hectic drive and meddling of those who reflect on the crisis, also contain a comic dimension? ... It seems to me, then, that the only ones who can respond to the pandemic are those for whom the comic aspect I mentioned triggers an astonished laughter. Without such laughter, I fear, there is a lurking danger of the pandemic contributing only to the consolidation of social tendencies whose momentum it brings to a standstill, at least on the face of it. Let me ask you this: What sort of social distancing, if any, does astonished laughter practice?"

Open letter by Alexander García Düttmann, University of the Arts in Berlin

March 25, 2020

Could the benefits of hindsight foreshadow the costs to come? The collision of colonialism and COVID-19 carries additional layers of risk for remote and urban Indigenous populations. Among those already impacted, dozens of confirmed cases on the Navajo Nation in the American southwest and two presumptive cases on a northern Saskatchewan First Nation including a nurse who tested positive after travel abroad. The kind of scenario that’s prompted multiple First Nations and tribes to restrict access to their communities.

Could history be repeating itself? We hear from Indigenous health historian Mary Jane McCallum, a Canada Research Chair in Indigenous People, History and Archives and University of Winnipeg history professor.

MEDIA INDIGENA: Indigenous current affairs, by Rick Harp

March 2020

The exercise of emergency powers in South Asia, whether in late 2007 in Pakistan or between 1975 and 1977 in India, is often associated with state overreach and abuse of human rights. Himal Southasian thought it would be a good time to revisit the history of emergency regulations to see how they have been used in the past and what their legacies may portend for South Asia.

In this interview, Himal Southasian speaks to Asanga Welikala, a lecturer in public law at the University of Edinburgh and a constitutional-law expert. He describes the common origins but divergent paths of South Asia’s emergency regulations, the different considerations for authoritarian and democratic regimes in addressing emergencies, and the impact that prolonged emergencies can have on democratic institutions.

A legal analysis of the origins and possible impacts of emergency law by Himal Southasian

March 2020

The plague is caused by a bacteria called Yersinia pestis, which lives in fleas that in turn live on rodents. Coronavirus is not the plague. Nonetheless, we can find many parallels between the current pandemic and the experience of plague for people who lived centuries ago. This special episode of Ottoman History Podcast brings together lessons from our past episodes on plague and disease in the early modern Mediterranean. Our guests offer state of the art perspectives on the history of plague in the Ottoman Empire, and many of their observations may also be useful for thinking about epidemics in the present day.

Featuring Nükhet Varlık, Yaron Ayalon, Orhan Pamuk, Lori Jones, Valentina Pugliano, and Edna Bonhomme narrated by Chris Gratien and Maryam Patton with contributions by Nir Shafir, Sam Dolbee, Tunç Şen, and Andreas Guidi

For instructors in students, we encourage you to listen with our comprehension and discussion questions in this GoogleDoc.

A podcast about the Ottoman Empire, the modern Middle East, and the Islamic world

March 2020

“They are placed on the cots until every bed is full and yet others crowd in. The faces soon wear a bluish cast; a distressing cough brings up the blood stained sputum. In the morning the dead bodies are stacked about the morgue like cord wood.”

An estimated 650,000 Americans lost their lives to the infamous and tragic 1918-1919 influenza epidemic, a small but significant fraction of the approximately 50 million deaths the disease caused worldwide. Countless more were left without parents, children, friends, and loved ones. Communities across the country did what they could to stem the rising tide of illness and death, closing their schools, churches, theaters, shops and saloons. Doctors, nurses, and volunteers gave their time – and, occasionally, their lives – to care for the ill.

These pages contain the stories of the places, the people, and the organizations that battled the American influenza epidemic of 1918-1919.

March 2020

Isolation measures to contain the spread of COVID-19 means that social researchers who conduct face-to-face fieldwork (interviews, focus groups, participant observation, ethnographies etc) are now faced with the challenge of either delaying or re-inventing their methods so that they can continue their research until these measures are relaxed.

This crowdsourced document provides a space for people to share their methods for doing fieldwork in a pandemic - specifically, ideas for avoiding in-person interactions by using mediated forms that will achieve similar ends.

Social research has been conducted online for many years, of course. There are many examples of using online survey tools or doing content analyses or ethnographies using existing online interactions as research materials. Interviews have been conducted by phone or Skype for a long time. This document was initially directed at ways for how to turn fieldwork that was initially planned as using face-to-face methods into a more ‘hands-off’ mode. However, people have added useful material about ‘born digital’ research (content already generated on the internet by online interactions), which provides an alternative source of social research materials if researchers decide to go down that path.

Please add your ideas below - and do share useful references if available.

NB: Deborah also curates a community Facebook page ‘Innovative Social Research Methods’ which may be of interest for those wanting to think about new and creative ways of doing social research .Innovative Social Research Methods Public Group

Crowdsourced document initiated by Deborah Lupton (@DALupton) . Please do add comments and resources as appropriate.

March 17, 2020

A collective research project examining the ongoing COVID-19 crisis as it shapes the lives of Asians, Asian Americans, and Pacific Islanders in the United States.

March 2020

COVID-19 is testing every aspect of our social, financial and political structures. Never before has the effective provision of robust evidence into policy been so critical and or on such a large scale. And while the need for trusted, quality research and evidence will be needed at every level of government and society, how this information is sourced, synthesised and utilised in the midst of a crisis, is not uniform around the world, or even within jurisdictions.

As an international networking of people at the forefront of working at the science/society/policy interfaces, INGSA is well-positioned to aggregate the information and the lessons arising out of the COVID-19 outbreak.

In this way we hope that we can inform future choices, better understand those that have been already made, and aim to foresight how these political, social and financial tremors will shape our future.

March 2020

Social scientists have an important role during a pandemic. We can do this much better through cooperation. This international list tracks new research about COVID 19, including published findings, pre-prints, projects underway, and projects at least at proposal stage.

GitHub Resource curated by J. Nathan Matias (Cornell University, Communication) and Alex Leavitt (Facebook Research, Health Integrity)

March 2020

An article outlining what is happening at the moment on Twitter regarding the history of epidemics, pandemics, and epizootics, also seeking to show how contextualizing work on Twitter illustrates that it might be time to turn to historians, alongside doctors and other public health professionals, when assessing policies to contain and get through the current pandemic.

by Dominik Hünniger

March 23, 2020

A special call for contributions from the 4S community. 4S are looking to put together a rough and iterative toolkit and a range of sources for 4S readers to think together around issues raised by the current coronavirus pandemic.

They would also like to publish this in April 2020. You can add your contributions by emailing editor Amanda Windle here: windle_amanda@hotmail.com, by adding a comment to the social media thread associated with this post, or by adding contributions to this open document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rgluzaeGAWewBWy04i0q_kyTuk0_hnfHLL1Ck0rd2aE/edit?usp=sharing

Call for Contributions by Amanda Windle

March 21, 2020

中国瘟疫史录

Article on Chinese Plague History

March 2020

A daily discussion of the COVID-19 global pandemic. 

Free and open to the public, Monday-Friday at 5pm EST, starting March 16.

Please spread the word #COVIDCalls, and send questions to host Scott Gabriel Knowles (sgk23@drexel.edu). Check his Twitter account @USofDisaster for daily updates and call-in links.

Epidemics, over and above the human suffering they bring, create panic and disruption and expose weaknesses in social and economic structures. They leave exposed those most vulnerable in our societies. As scientists, governments, health organizations, and authorities work to contain the spread of COVID-19, we as historians can explore and learn from the outbreak and management of epidemics in the past.

List of resources by the Society for the Social History of Medicine (SSHM) to help members and those interested in the history of disease.

March 2020

"We need to be on guard against the xenophobia and persecution that arose during outbreaks of that dreaded disease."

Article in the New York Times

March 1, 2020

The Wuhan coronavirus crisis – or COVID-19, as the World Health Organisation encourages us to call it to avoid scapegoating a region or people – gives cause for reflection on the useful work humanities scholars have done on similar crises, and will in the future on this one. Can our work on past epidemics help medical workers, governments and society in general get to grips with what is happening at present?

Article by the Irish Humanities Alliance (IHA)

February 25, 2020

Somatosphere’s COVID-19 Forum brings together seventeen anthropologists and historians in an effort to share ideas, analytical frameworks and concerns about the ongoing epidemic from interdisciplinary perspectives. An analytical and critical engagement with the epidemic, both in China and across the globe, is still pertinent, not only so that ethnographic and historical context can be provided (and such context is indeed urgently needed in many cases), but also so that the wider social impact of the epidemic and of epidemic containment measures is understood, and critical tools are developed for engaging with the epidemic crisis in its complex social reality. The contributions to this Forum thus aim to examine the epidemic in itself, but also in comparison to other epidemics and epidemic-control processes. It is hoped that the Forum will foster interdisciplinary discussion and collaboration in response to the ongoing COVID-19 epidemic, and that it will inspire new critical and analytical approaches to the ways in which the new coronavirus epidemic is conceptualised, discussed, experienced and contained.

March 6, 2020

Feel free to add your own resources to this list.

STS Resources List by Science as Culture @SciAsCulture

March 2020

ACRL has launched a new Pandemic Resources for Academic Libraries LibGuide, featuring updated information, free professional development, open access publications, and other resources to support academic and research library personnel during a pandemic. The guide includes resources for distance education and engagement, free webcasts and publications, best practices, information on self-care and working from home, up-to-date information from public health officials, and collections of ALA and community-sourced resources to assist in navigating a pandemic.

Pandemic Resources for Academic Libraries

Association of College and Research Libraries: A Division of the American Library Association

March 2020

Platform including calls for research, news, and updates—curated by Kim Fortun, Duygu Kasdogan, Tim Schütz, Pedro de la Torre III, Sharon Traweek and Scott Knowles.

Resource by the Disaster-STS Network

March 2020

As a scholar of medical history, Gregg Mitman has studied infectious disease outbreaks over several centuries, in various parts of the world. The current pandemic has him thinking hard about the stories we will eventually tell (indeed, are already telling) about the global impact of COVID-19.

An Interview with Gregg Mitman by the University of Wisconsin-Madison

March 17, 2020

In the early 1700s, about a century before Edward Jenner conceived the idea of a smallpox vaccine based on the cowpox virus, smallpox was going through New England and other American Colonies. In Massachusetts, colonists there saw smallpox arrive with cargo ships to Boston over and over again. There was not much the authorities could do beyond imposing quarantines and treating the sick.

This changed in 1721 thanks to the wisdom passed on from Onesimus, an African slave sold to Cotton Mather, an influential minister in Boston. (You might remember Mather from learning about the Salem Witch Trials.) Mather had bought Onesimus in 1706 and came to converse with him and learn about Onesimus' past. When Mather asked Onesimus if he had ever had smallpox back in Africa, Onesimus described the practice of variolation to prevent smallpox epidemics.

Article by Rene F. Najera

February 3, 2019