Infectious Historians

Janet Kay (Princeton University) talks to Merle and Lee for a special episode about preparing to teach her “Art & Archaeology of Plague” during the upcoming Spring 2021 semester. She discusses her planning for the broad chronological range of her course that runs from the Plague of Athens (c. 430 BCE) to Covid-19, while introducing Plague Simulations, an innovative set of assignments, and seve...

Lukas Engelmann (University of Edinburgh) joins Merle and Lee to discuss the history of epidemiology. The conversation begins by thinking about epidemiology as a discipline as well as the gap between the discipline and scholars who use epidemiology. After discussing the development of epidemiology, including in the context of Covid-19, the interview moves to reflect upon infectious disease models,...

Adia Benton (Northwestern University) talks to Merle and Lee about the West African Ebola outbreak in 2014 and why that disease in particular has terrified Western audiences since the late 20th century. After discussing the basics on what Ebola is, where it was discovered, and where it is found today, Adia expands upon its recent large outbreak in West Africa. She then examines why so little time...

Chinmay Tumbe (Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad) talks to Merle and Lee about his new book, The Age of Pandemics, that reveals the story of how three pandemics - cholera, plague and influenza - have significantly affected India over the course of the long 19th century, resulting in episodes of mass mortality. He first discusses some background on all three pandemics and then turns to why t...

Merle and Lee record their final episode for 2020 in which they cover a recently published article of theirs. The article, published in the American Historical Review, examines how scholars thought about the Justinianic Plague over the past century and a half. While the scholarly interpretation of plague increased to include more deaths over a longer period and a wider geographical scope, Merle an...

Guy Beiner (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev) talks to Merle and Lee about his work on the memory and forgetting of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic. Guy first provides background about the impact of the Influenza Pandemic and offers an introduction to memory studies and social forgetting while pointing to problems with concepts such as collective memory. During the discussion Guy examines how histor...

John McNeill (Georgetown University) speaks with Merle and Lee about the changes to environmental and disease history over the last half century. After laying out his definition of environmental history, John discusses the background of the field, then reflects on how different chronological and geographical fields use sources along with how this may change moving forward. Following the previous e...

Susan Jones (University of Minnesota) talks to Merle and Lee about the role of animals in the spread of diseases and how these diseases can spill over from animals to humans. After laying out some background on the topic, she discusses her new work on “Plague Homelands” in Soviet central Asia during the 20th century. Susan talks about how the Soviet state first attempted to eliminate and then cont...

A.J. Herrmann (Director of Policy for Mayor Quinton Lucas of Kansas City, Missouri) speaks with Merle and Lee about one of their key ideas, the diversity of local experiences during a pandemic, tying it to the present-day experience of Covid in Kansas City since the beginning of the pandemic. AJ begins by laying out the complex regional administrative and political situation of Kansas City, which...

Katie Foss (Middle Tennessee State University) talks to Merle and Lee about her recently published book on epidemics in the media and collective memory in U.S. history from the early 18th century to the mid-20th century. Katie discusses the changes in media technology and how this shifted the coverage of epidemics across these two centuries. She then turns to how the media plays a key role in shap...

David Pickel , PhD Candidate at Stanford University and Director of Excavations, La Villa Romana di Poggio Gramignano Archaeological Project, Lugnano in Teverina, Italy sits down with Merle and Lee to talk about his research on malaria in the ancient world from both a local and a global perspective. He discusses his ongoing archaeological excavation of a child cemetery, which may have been used sp...

Mary Brazelton (University of Cambridge) joins Merle and Lee to talk about her work on vaccinations in China in the early and mid-twentieth century. Mary highlights the Chinese governments’ attempts to vaccinate its citizens, including in times of war, and the different options citizens and officials had at their disposal. The conversation also covers science in China and Chinese scientists’ invol...

Elliott Bowen (Nazarbayev University) joins Merle and Lee to discuss his work on sexual health more broadly. The conversation focuses on syphilis, a venereal disease, between the late 19th and mid-20th centuries in the United States. The disease itself is first put into its social and cultural contexts. One of the most popular centers for the treatment of syphilis at the time was Hot Springs, Arka...

Jacob Steere-Williams (College of Charleston) discusses the role of typhoid fever in Victorian (19th century) England as a key reason for the development of epidemiology. The chat begins with some background about typhoid and its effects along with comparisons to other diseases such as cholera and plague. Jacob then surveys how epidemiology developed over the course of the late 19th century and it...

Tara Malanga (Rutgers University) comes on the podcast to discuss her research on colonial Mexico. The conversation begins with a survey of smallpox and the situation in the New World just before Columbus, then examines smallpox after Contact. Tara describes some of the sources and methodology she uses in her research, and describes some of the ways indigenous populations understood the new infect...

Elise Mitchell (NYU) sits down to talk to Merle and Lee for the second episode of their mini-arc on vaccines and vaccinations. They discuss the impact of smallpox and forced inoculations on enslaved people during the 17th and 18th centuries, the experiences of enslaved people during this process, and governmental and non-governmental responses to epidemic outbreaks. At the end, Elise talks about t...

Jim Harris (Ohio State University) joins Merle and Lee to offer an overview of the development of vaccinations since the first smallpox vaccine in the late 18th century. The discussion touches upon pre-18th century practices for treating smallpox, before examining the spread in vaccination use. The second part of the interview moves to discuss anti-vaccination ideas and movements in their socio-cu...

Michael Vann (California State University, Sacramento) talks to Merle and Lee about the arrival of the Third Plague Pandemic in colonial Vietnam that led to the Great Hanoi Rat Hunt. Michael tells the amazing and amusing story of how colonial administrators put out bounties for killing rats in an effort to stop the spread of plague, and the surprising results of that approach. The story sheds ligh...

Mari Webel (University of Pittsburgh) discusses the impact of sleeping sickness at the turn of the 20th century in East Africa. Mari talks about the role of sleeping sickness both before and after European colonization and how this disease shaped public health more broadly. She also speaks about the experience of local inhabitants during imperial efforts to stop sleeping sickness. The conversation...

Merle and Lee consider games that feature infectious diseases in multiple media. After a brief overview of types of games and references to games that feature infectious diseases as part of their plot, the conversation focuses on two popular and successful, yet very different pandemic games where the infectious disease pandemic is central to the game: Pandemic and Plague Inc . Pandemic is a cooper...

Nancy Tomes (Stony Brook) talks to Merle and Lee about how Germ Theory was developed in the second half of the 19th century and how the public learned of it through advertising and other forms of mass media. Nancy also talks about the central role of women in this process alongside how ideas about germs changed over the 20th century. Other topics they discuss are the centrality of the AIDS pandemi...

Priscilla Wald (Duke University) joins Merle and Lee to discuss the “outbreak narrative” she outlined in her influential book Contagious . After defining the outbreak narrative as a common way to understand infectious disease outbreaks, the conversation moves to examine where the outbreak narrative is used, and why has it been so popular for so long. Other topics covered include the relationship b...

Merle and Lee chat about four myths that have repeatedly circulated in popular media about the effects of the Black Death: it was an economic leveler that ended feudalism, it led to the Renaissance, it created modern public health, and it changed intellectual ideas about medicine. They reflect upon why these myths remain popular, since they are based upon causal ideas of history where one big even...

Vincent Racaniello (Columbia University) joins the podcast to discuss virology. The conversation includes trends and developments in virology over the past few decades. Vincent discusses the importance of vaccines in preventing pandemics, and offers an overview of the connections between politics, industry and research. Multiple references throughout the conversation touch upon the research, colla...

Amir Afkhami (George Washington University) talks to Merle and Lee about the 19th and early 20th century outbreaks of cholera in Iran. He begins with a broad overview of recent Iranian history in the context of infectious diseases, and continues to discuss how imperialism and colonialism shaped how cholera struck Iran. Amir then shows how modern public health emerged in the country as one of the o...