This talk, presented by Sari Altschuler (English; Associate Director, Northeastern Humanities Center; Founding Director, Health, Humanities, and Society minor at Northeastern University), examines the proliferation and failure of narratives accounting for life during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Key to that failure is a difficulty narrating the infrastructural causes of pandemics, a difficulty that has its roots in the nineteenth-century origins of modern global health. Finally, the talk will consider what we might learn from people who lived with extended global pandemics in the past. More details forthcoming.
