Epidemics and Pandemics in History (Level 7)

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 7
• Convenor: Professor Jessica Reinisch
• Assessment: a 1000-word book review (20%), presentation (20%) and 3000-word essay (60%)

Covid-19 was a reminder of how dramatic and terrifying outbreaks of epidemic diseases can be. And yet, three years after the start of the Covid pandemic, many of us have gone back to life without giving much thought to disease or public health. This one-week intensive course invites you to think historically and critically about how a changing understanding of disease interacts with political models of governance and a range of economic and social priorities, along with global responses and failures to respond and memories of pandemics in the past.

Drawing on an array of primary sources to be explored during trips to archives and museums and in seminar discussion, we will help you gain an understanding of the arc of modern history viewed through the prism of public health, and to develop your own research projects.

Indicative syllabus

• Anti-contagionism and the sanitary idea
• States and the policing of disease
• Disease and empire
• International control of disease
• War and disease
• Memories of historical pandemics
• Disease case studies will include cholera, smallpox, typhus, syphilis, influenza, malaria, polio, HIV/AIDS

By the end of this module, you will have:

• gained an overview of key developments in nineteenth- and twentieth-century political, social and medical history, and public health as a field of enquiry
• engaged with key historiographical debates about anti-contagionism, anti-vaccinationism, nationalism, imperialism, different internationalisms, individual rights, the role of war, and the role of memory and forgetting
• reflected on the role of history to make sense of current and recent events surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic.