Historical Perspectives On Contemporary Issues
Series: IsisCB Special Issue on Pandemics
This series offers discussions with the editors and authors of a special issue of the Isis Current Bibliography. It provides perspectives into the state of current scholarship on the history of pandemics, and where the field might be heading in the future. For more information, and to access the special issue, see
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/isis/2023/114/S1.
The open peer review site can be found here: https://pandemics.isiscb.org.
Jump to:
- Introduction
- Fundamental Concepts in Understanding Pandemic Diseases
- The Social and Political Dimensions of Pandemic Diseases
Neeraja Sankaran and Stephen P. Weldon introduce the series.
Get an inside view of the editorial decisions and motivations behind a special issue of the Isis Current Bibliography, which focuses on scholarship in the history of pandemics. The editors discuss several important topics, including their approach to making the special issue both open access and open peer review; their efforts to make their special issue global in scope; and their editorial management of scholarly collaboration.
Neeraja Sankaran is a historian of science and medicine at the National Centre for Biological Sciences-TIFR, Bangalore, India. Her work focuses on the recent and near-contemporary history of biomedical sciences. An independent scholar since 2015, she has held both research and teaching positions at universities in different parts of the world, including the United States, Egypt, South Korea, India, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands.
Stephen P. Weldon is a historian of science at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of The Scientific Spirit of American Humanism (Johns Hopkins Press, 2020) and is editor of the Isis Bibliography of the History of Science, the definitive bibliographical resource for the discipline, which goes back to 1913. In 2015, he established an online open access service called IsisCB Explore that allows anyone to search this database.
Closed-captioning available on YouTube.
Recorded August 29, 2022.
Fundamental Concepts in Understanding Pandemic Diseases
Image courtesy of Stephen Weldon.
This episode of the series features contributors who wrote and reviewed bibliographic essays surveying the literature about concepts fundamental to our understanding of pandemic and epidemic diseases, such as the broad disciplinary category of epidemiology, as well as the concepts of vaccinations and syndemics. Offering their perspectives on the significance of these topics are: Lukas Engelmann, Jacob Steere-Williams and Dora Vargha. They discuss how historians can move away from a model of biography of disease and towards a better understanding of the co-occurrence of disease epidemics with epidemics of social phenomena.
Lukas Engelmann, University of Edinburgh.
Closed-captioning available on YouTube.
Recorded April 24, 2023.
The Social and Political Dimensions of Pandemic Diseases
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Following in the wake of the Isis CB special issue on pandemics, this episode of the companion podcast takes a deeper look at the societal contexts of pandemics, and also considers the impact of doing such a history during times of disease crises. Contributors Kavita Sivaramakrishnan, Keith Wailoo and Emily Hamilton share their insights and and experiences of taking stock of literature and also of the impact that COVID-19 had on their own scholarship and teaching.
Kavita Sivaramakrishnan, Columbia University
Author, with Valentina Parisi: The Limits of Linearity: Recasting Histories of Epidemics in the Global South
Reviewer: Epidemic Inequities: Social and Racial Inequality in the History of Pandemics
Keith Wailoo, Princeton University
Author, with Michael McGovern: Epidemic Inequities: Social and Racial Inequality in the History of Pandemics
Emily Hamilton, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Author: Conclusion: What It Means
Closed-captioning available on YouTube.
Recorded October 19, 2023.