Furniss Lecture: Why History (Still) Needs Historians: Adventures at the Edge of Pandemic Studies

Why History (Still) Needs Historians: Adventures at the Edge of Pandemic Studies

Presented as the Furniss Lecture at Clark A 101 , Colorado State University, Fort Collins – 14 April 2023 – 7PM

We’re honored to have Dr. Monica H. Green as our conference Lecturer.

Abstract:

In the past fifty years, the resurgence of old diseases like tuberculosis and measles, and the arrival of new ones like Ebola, HIV, and COVID, have challenged the complacency that the era of infectious diseases was over. As the histories of these diseases come increasingly into view thanks to the developments in the paleosciences, there has been an increasing awareness that, like modern climate change, humans have a lot to do with the disease environment we find ourselves in. This talk will recount how historians and scientists are reinterrogating inherited narratives of pandemic diseases, going back to the premodern world’s greatest scourge, plague.

Read the full abstract here:🔗