HR230-5-AU-CO:
Pandemics: Lessons from History
PLEASE NOTE: This module is inactive. Visit the Module Directory to view modules and variants offered during the current academic year.
2023/24
Philosophical, Historical and Interdisciplinary Studies (School of)
Colchester Campus
Autumn
Undergraduate: Level 5
Inactive
Thursday 05 October 2023
Friday 15 December 2023
15
11 May 2022
Requisites for this module
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This module is an urgent response to a contemporary crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic has reminded us through deeply painful lessons that the impact of epidemics and our response to them are always social.
It focuses upon six major pandemics in early modern and modern period – bubonic plague (the so-called 'Black Death'), smallpox, cholera, the 1918-19 Influenza, HIV/Aids – exploring how societies responded to as well as being shaped by them.
The module implicitly considers the COVID-19 pandemic through which we are living and places it within the framework developed by the module. It will provide an entry point for students to explore how pandemics expose, reproduce, and harden existing prejudices and inequalities in societies.
From Jews during the Black Death in medieval Europe to gays and Afro-American minorities during the AIDS epidemic and others, the poor and outgroups are always blamed for causing or spread the disease. On the other hand, public health measures from quarantine ships in early modern Europe to the use of bio-surveillance as of the late 19th century and during the current pandemic have given justification for increasing police power and unethical use of technology.
Other phenomena disclose a more hopeful pattern: forms of cooperation, solidarity and action which take different forms in different societies and periods, but which all point towards a desire to ensure collective survival and understanding.
To provide students with perspectives and frameworks derived from the history of pandemics that will introduce them to a mode of seeing and being in the world that teaches them to disentangle some of the debates emerged from the current pandemic; the social and cultural meanings of pandemics, and the prejudices they invoked. Drawing from lessons of the past pandemics, this module is an important entry point for students seeking perspective on the current pandemic and to try understand the social-political and cultural responses we have seen.
1. The fashioning of a historically-informed analytical framework to understand the impact and implications of pandemics in the past and present.
2. The critical appreciation of key scholarship relating to pandemics.
3. A broad understanding of continuities and contrasts in response to pandemics in different periods and societies.
General background readings:
Rosenberg, Charles E. "What Is an Epidemic? AIDS in Historical Perspective." Daedalus, vol. 118, no. 2, The MIT Press, 1989, pp. 1–17, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20025233.
Zhou Xun and Sander L. Gilman, I know who caused COVID-19 : pandemics and xenophobia
Nancy Brisow, American Pandemic. The Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic.
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel.
Laura Spinney, Pale Rider. The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World.
World Health Organisation, AIDS: Images of the Epidemic.
Hans Zinnser, Rats, Lice and History.
These will take the form of lectures and seminars, with some occasional showing of films.
This module does not appear to have a published bibliography for this year.
Assessment items, weightings and deadlines
| Coursework / exam |
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Coursework weighting |
Exam format definitions
- Remote, open book: Your exam will take place remotely via an online learning platform. You may refer to any physical or electronic materials during the exam.
- In-person, open book: Your exam will take place on campus under invigilation. You may refer to any physical materials such as paper study notes or a textbook during the exam. Electronic devices may not be used in the exam.
- In-person, open book (restricted): The exam will take place on campus under invigilation. You may refer only to specific physical materials such as a named textbook during the exam. Permitted materials will be specified by your department. Electronic devices may not be used in the exam.
- In-person, closed book: The exam will take place on campus under invigilation. You may not refer to any physical materials or electronic devices during the exam. There may be times when a paper dictionary,
for example, may be permitted in an otherwise closed book exam. Any exceptions will be specified by your department.
Your department will provide further guidance before your exams.
Overall assessment
Reassessment
Module supervisor and teaching staff
Dr Xun Zhou, email: xzhoug@essex.ac.uk.
Belinda Waterman, Department of History, 01206 872313
Yes
Yes
No
Dr Ingeborg Dornan
Brunel University London
Reader in History
Available via Moodle
Of 40 hours, 39 (97.5%) hours available to students:
1 hours not recorded due to service coverage or fault;
0 hours not recorded due to opt-out by lecturer(s), module, or event type.
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