Humanities Coronavirus Syllabus
History/Primary Sources/Databases 17
Literature/Secondary Sources 18
Short Takes/Teachable Interviews, Articles, Podcasts, and Websites 28
Literature/Primary Sources
Appelfeld, Aharon. Badenheim 1939. 1978. [life in the midst of crisis]. Full text in English [PDF].
It is spring 1939. In months Europe will be Hitler’s. And Badenheim, a resort town vaguely in the orbit of Vienna, is preparing for its summer season. The vacationers arrive as they always have, a sampling of Jewish middle-class life. To receive them in the town are the pharmacist and his worried wife, the hotelier and his large staff, the pastry shop owner and his irritable baker, Sally and Gertie (two prostitutes), and, mysteriously, the bland inspectors from the “Sanitation Department.” Finally, the vacationers, whose numbers have now increased by the forced crowding-in of other Jews hardly on vacation, become de facto prisoners in their familiar resort; their “vacation” begins to take on the lineaments of undefined disaster. - Amazon
Asimov, Isaac. The Naked Sun. New York: Doubleday, 1957. Set in the distant future on the planet Solaria, a world whose inhabitants are obsessively afraid of germs and as such live on remote estates in isolation, only interacting with each other over video calls. When a Solarian is found murdered in isolation, a detective from Earth must travel to Solaria, where he is ostracized due to anti-Earth bias, as Earth is seen as a dirty planet and its inhabitants as plague-bearers.
Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake: a Novel. New York: Penguin Random House, 2003. Full text.
Snowman, known as Jimmy before mankind was overwhelmed by a plague, is struggling to survive in a world where he may be the last human, and mourning the loss of his best friend, Crake, and the beautiful and elusive Oryx whom they both loved. In search of answers, Snowman embarks on a journey–with the help of the green-eyed Children of Crake–through the lush wilderness that was so recently a great city, until powerful corporations took mankind on an uncontrolled genetic engineering ride.- Amazon
Barrett, Andrea. Ship Fever: Stories. W. W. Norton, 1996. The elegant short fictions gathered here about the love of science and the science of love are often set against the backdrop of the nineteenth century. Interweaving historical and fictional characters, they encompass both past and present as they negotiate the complex territory of ambition, failure, achievement, and shattered dreams. In "Ship Fever," the title novella, a young Canadian doctor finds himself at the center of one of history's most tragic epidemics.- abridged from publisher.
Bi Shumin 毕淑敏, Huaguan bingdu 花冠病毒 (Coronavirus). Changsha: Hunan wenyi
chubanshe, 2012. No English translation yet; for a summary in English, see: Yu Xiaomei, "Why You Should Read Bi Shumin’s NovelCoronavirus," MCLC Resource Center Publication (March 2020).
Boccaccio, Giovanni. The Decameron. Italy (1353). Full text in English.
Collection of novellas by the 14th-century Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375). The book is structured as a frame story containing 100 tales told by a group of seven young women and three young men sheltering in a secluded villa just outside Florence to escape the Black Death, which was afflicting the city. Boccaccio probably conceived of The Decameron after the epidemic of 1348, and completed it by 1353. The various tales of love in The Decameron range from the erotic to the tragic. Tales of wit, practical jokes, and life lessons contribute to the mosaic. In addition to its literary value and widespread influence (for example on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales), it provides a document of life at the time. Written in the vernacular of the Florentine language, it is considered a masterpiece of classical early Italian prose -- Wikipedia
Brown, Charles Brockden. Arthur Mervyn, or, Memoirs of the year 1793 : With related texts. (First published in 1799) Ed. Barnard, P., & Shapiro, S. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Pub, 2008. Full text 1889 edition. [yellow fever] Stephen Shapiro and Philip Barnard have kindly made their introduction to the Hackett edition freely available here.
Brown, Charles Brockden. Ormond, or, The secret witness : With related texts. (First published in 1799) Ed. Barnard, P., & Shapiro, S. Indianapolis: Hackett Pub., 2009. Full text 1811 edition. Stephen Shapiro and Philip Barnard have kindly made their introduction to the Hackett edition freely available here.
This long novel was written in the late nineteenth century. It tells the story of a young man who goes to Philadelphia just as the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 breaks out. It is a chaotic story that reflects the chaos of those years.
Brooks, Geraldine. Year of Wonders: a novel of the plague. Penguin, 2002.
Inspired by a true story...set in 17th century England, of a village that quarantines itself to arrest the spread of the plague - Amazon
Brooks, Max. World War Z : An oral history of the zombie war (1st ed.). New York: Crown, 2006. Full text.
Zombie apocalyptic horror novel written by American author Max Brooks. The novel is a collection of individual accounts narrated by an agent of the United Nations Postwar Commission, following the devastating global conflict against the zombie plague. Other passages record a decade-long desperate struggle, as experienced by people of various nationalities. The personal accounts also describe the resulting social, political, religious, and environmental changes. - wikipedia
Burns, Charles. Black Hole. New York: Pantheon Books, 2008. [STDs]
Black Hole is a twelve-issue comic book limited series ...The story deals with the aftermath of a sexually transmitted disease that causes grotesque mutations in teenagers. Burns has said that the mutations can be read as a metaphor for adolescence, sexual awakening and the transition into adulthood. - wikipedia
Butler, Octavia E. Parable of the Sower. Earthseed. Open Road Media, 2000.
Parable of the Sower is the Butlerian odyssey of one woman who is twice as feeling in a world that has become doubly dehumanized. The time is 2025. The place is California, where small walled communities must protect themselves from hordes of desperate scavengers and roaming bands of people addicted to a drug that activates an orgasmic desire to burn, rape, and murder. When one small community is overrun, Lauren Olamina, an 18 year old black woman with the hereditary trait of “hyperempathy” —which causes her to feel others’ pain as her own—sets off on foot along the dangerous coastal highways, moving north into the unknown. - jacket description
Butler, Octavia. “Speech Sounds” [1983]. Received a Hugo Award, reprinted in Bloodchild and Other Stories, 1995; 2005. Full text. A global pandemic has decimated the population and unevenly affected survivors’ ability to communicate using spoken or written language and react rationally. Living in fear and isolation, a former UCLA history professor and mother sets out in search of family and human understanding.
Camus, Albert. The Plague. [1947] Trans. from the French by Stuart Gilbert, 1948. Full text in English. Story of a plague epidemic in Algeria and how it affects a range of people. Thought to be based on a cholera epidemic in the town of Oran and/or Camus’ recurrent bouts of tuberculosis.
Cortázar, Julio. The Winners. New York: Pantheon Books, 1965.
The passengers on a threadbare “luxury” cruise are confined to a small area of the ship and told that disease is spreading among the crew. The novel explores how they pass their time in an uncertain quarantine. - @thedenature
Cortázar, Julio. Final Exam. New Directions Publishing, 2000. A group of young people prepare for the state exam of undefined disciplines amidst strange fog caused by fungus or disease that occupies parts of the city.
Crichton, Michael. The Andromeda Strain. Knopf, 1969. (Also see movie version)
A military space probe, sent to collect extraterrestrial organisms from the upper atmosphere, is knocked out of orbit and falls to Earth. Twelve miles from the crash site, an inexplicable and deadly phenomenon terrorizes the residents of a sleepy desert town in Arizona, leaving only two survivors: an elderly addict and a newborn infant. Four of the nation’s most elite biophysicists are summoned to a clandestine underground laboratory located five stories beneath the desert and fitted with an automated atomic self-destruction mechanism for cases of irremediable contamination. Under conditions of total news blackout and the utmost urgency, the scientists race to understand and contain the crisis. - publisher
Cronin, Justin. The Passage. Ballantine Books, 2010.
A group of scientists isolate a virus from bats in a tropical rainforest, and return to a military laboratory to attempt to weaponize the organism. The test subjects, a group of death row inmates, eventually escape, spreading the disease and creating a new species of vampiric humans. The middle section of the book recounts the fall of society in the U.S. The last half of the book portrays a small colony of survivors almost a century later, struggling to understand the civilization that preceded them. Cronin’s book is referenced in passing (pun intended!)--it makes a cameo in an airport bookstore--in Station Eleven, and Emily St. John Mandel cites this novel as having inspired her own . Intense, chilling, and extremely well-written, with sections of violence that are not for the squeamish.
Czerwiec, M.K. Taking Turns: Stories from HIV/AIDS Care Unit 371. Penn State University Press, 2017. In 1994, at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the United States, MK Czerwiec took her first nursing job, at Illinois Masonic Medical Center in Chicago, as part of the caregiving staff of HIV/AIDS Care Unit 371. Taking Turns pulls back the curtain on life in the ward. A shining example of excellence in the treatment and care of patients, Unit 371 was a community for thousands of patients and families affected by HIV and AIDS and the people who cared for them. This graphic novel combines Czerwiec’s memories with the oral histories of patients, family members, and staff. It depicts life and death in the ward, the ways the unit affected and informed those who passed through it, and how many look back on their time there today. - Amazon
Cutter, Nick. The Troop. Simon and Schuster, 2014. [Horror/thriller novel; Amazon reviews describe it as gory; includes animal torture.] Once a year, Scoutmaster Tim Riggs leads a troop of boys into the Canadian wilderness for a weekend camping trip—a tradition as comforting and reliable as a good ghost story around a roaring bonfire. But when an unexpected intruder stumbles upon their campsite—shockingly thin, disturbingly pale, and voraciously hungry—Tim and the boys are exposed to something far more frightening than any tale of terror. The human carrier of a bioengineered nightmare. A horror that spreads faster than fear. A harrowing struggle for survival with no escape from the elements, the infected . . . or one another. - publisher
Defoe, Daniel. A Journal of the Plague Year: Being Observations or Memorials of the Most Remarkable Occurrences, as Well Publick as Private, Which Happened in London during the Last Great Visitation in 1665. Oxford English Novels. London, New York [etc.]: Oxford UP, [1722] 1969. Full text. Teachable excerpts gathered by Will Deringer available here. Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year is a work of what we would now call “creative nonfiction.” In it, Defoe narrates his observations of “normal” life in the city of London as the bubonic plague of 1665 passed through it. The stories he tells are all, presumably, true, yet the degree to which they were directly witnessed and faithfully reported remains to the reader to evaluate. Defoe’s style, anecdotal and meditative, anticipates the flaneur tradition of the centuries to come (best recognized in works like those of W.G. Sebald and Teju Cole). Defoe’s framing foregrounds the profound, fraying consequences of fear in pre-Enlightenment English society, and invites reflection on the germ-like power of rumor in a civic community on the brink of consolidation through print technology. - Ana Schwartz
Feinberg, David B. Eighty-Sixed. Grove Press, 1989. [AIDS]
---. Spontaneous Combustion. Penguin, 1992. [AIDS]
Forster, E. M. “The Machine Stops.” 1909. Full text. In the future, humans believing the world’s surface is uninhabitable live in isolated subterranean cells connected by the “Machine,” an internet-like device which facilitates audio and visual connection but also enables surveillance and the enforcement of state ideology.
García Márquez, Gabriel. Love in the Time of Cholera. [1985] Everyman's Library, 1997.
In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is devastated, but he is a romantic. As he rises in his business career he whiles away the years in 622 affairs--yet he reserves his heart for Fermina. Her husband dies at last, and Florentino purposefully attends the funeral. Fifty years, nine months, and four days after he first declared his love for Fermina, he will do so again. - From the publisher. Nadia Celis adds: The background to the love story is the Cholera epidemics that devastated Cartagena de Indias in 1849, taking the lives of a third of the city's population, and subsequently spreading along the Colombian Caribbean.
Ghosh, Amitav. The Calcutta Chromosome : a Novel of Fevers, Delirium, and Discovery. Bangalore: Ravi Dayal Publisher; Distributed by Orient Longman Ltd., 1996. This novel has been described as "a kind of mystery thriller" (India Today). It brings together three searches: the first is that of an Egyptian clerk, Antar, working alone in a New York apartment in the early years of the twenty-first century to trace the adventures of L. Murugan, who disappeared in Calcutta in 1995; the second pertains to Murugan's obsession with the missing links in the history of malaria research; the third search is that of Urmila Roy, a journalist in Calcutta in 1995 who is researching the works of Phulboni, a writer who produced a strange cycle of "Lakhan stories" that he wrote in the 1930s but suppressed thereafter. -Amitav Ghosh home page
Giono, Jean. The Horseman on the Roof: A Novel. North Point Press, [1951] 2014. [cholera]
Adventure novel tells the story of Angelo Pardi, a young Italian carbonaro colonel of hussars, caught up in the 1832 cholera epidemic in Provence. - wikipedia
Hambly, Barbara. Fever Season. New York: Bantam Books, 1998.
The summer of 1833 has been one of brazen heat and brutal pestilence, as the city is stalked by Bronze John—the popular name for the deadly yellow fever epidemic that tests the healing skills of doctor and voodoo alike. Even as Benjamin January tends the dying at Charity Hospital during the steaming nights, he continues his work as a music teacher during the day. When he is asked to pass a message from a runaway slave to the servant of one of his students, January finds himself swept into a tempest of lies, greed, and murder that rivals the storms battering New Orleans. And to find the truth he must risk his freedom…and his very life. - publisher
Harriott, Thomas. A Briefe and True Report of the Newfound Land of Virginia. (London, 1588.) Full text. Contains an account of Native populations succumbing to an infectious disease (possibly typhoid or malaria) while the English survived. He reports that the Algonkian people, upon observing that entire communities would fall ill after the English visited, believed that the English used magical powers to shoot them with “invisible bullets.”
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “Minister’s Black Veil.” [mask wearing] Full text.
---. “Lady Eleanore’s Mantle.” The United States Democratic Review (Dec. 1838, Vol 2. Issue 12). A mantle, a dying woman, and an epidemic of smallpox in the 1720s in Boston. Gothic galore. - Cécile Roudeau
Haynes, Todd. Safe in Far from Heaven, Safe, and Superstar: Three Screenplays, Grove/Atlantic, Inc., [1995] 2007. [social distancing, race, social anxiety]
Safe...is the disturbing, elusive story of an affluent suburban housewife whose life is shattered by a mysterious illness. - Amazon.
Herrera, Yuri. The Transmigration of Bodies. Los Angeles: And Other Stories, 2016.
A fixer has to deliver a body that has ended in the wrong hands in a city under the
siege of an epidemic.
Hesse, Hermann. Narcissus and Goldmund.
In this novel, set in medieval Germany, Goldmund goes to live in the forest during the Black Death with friends Robert and Helene. "Death was no longer a warrior, a hangman or a rigid father, death was now also like a mother or a beloved one, its call was a call of love, its touch a shudder of love." (The section about the Black Death is only a few chapters of the novel, which follows Goldmund’s journeying throughout his life.) - Jenna (please fill in your last name if you see this)
Hu Fayun 胡發雲, Ruyan如焉@sars.come (Such is this world@sars.come). Hong Kong: Wenhua
yishu chubanshe. 2007 (banned in mainland China). English translation: Such is this world@sars.come. Translated by Andrew Clark. Dobbs Ferry, NY: Ragged Banner Press, 2011. A shy and elegant widow finds her voice in writing for the Internet, and a powerful official seeks her hand. When she learns of a terrifying new disease, she watches online warnings of the plague get eerily deleted before her eyes. Through the Internet she meets a small band of freethinkers, comes to view history in a new light, and finds that truth has a price. (description from: http://www.raggedbanner.com/HFY/HFY_root.html)
Ibsen, Henrik. Ghosts. [1881] Translated, with an Introduction, by William Archer. Project Gutenberg, 2009. [STDs] Full text in English. Helen Alving is about to dedicate an orphanage she has built in memory of her late husband, Captain Alving. She reveals to Pastor Manders that her marriage was secretly miserable because her husband was unfaithful. She has built the orphanage to deplete her husband's wealth so that their son Oswald will not inherit anything from him. In the course of the play, she discovers that her son Oswald (whom she had sent away to avoid his being corrupted by his father) is suffering from syphilis that she believes he inherited from his father. She also discovers that Oswald has fallen in love with her maid Regina Engstrand, who is revealed to be the illegitimate daughter of Captain Alving and is therefore Oswald's half-sister. When Regina and Oswald's sibling relationship is exposed, Regina departs, leaving Oswald in anguish. He asks his mother to help him avoid the late stages of syphilis with a fatal morphine overdose. She agrees, but only if it becomes necessary. The play concludes with Mrs. Alving having to confront the decision of whether or not to euthanize her son in accordance with his wishes. -wikipedia
James, Henry. Daisy Miller. Harper and Brothers, 1879.
Daisy dies of “Roman Fever” - Kim Adams
Jemisin, N.K. The Fifth Season (Broken Earth #1). Orbit, 2015.
An on-the-ground account of a planetary disaster in a fantasy landscape. In addition to being a Hugo Award-winning text (the first of three in a row for Jemisin, itself a first for any author, much less a woman of color), it is also being held up as an example of the blossoming “hopepunk” subgenre, a dedication to hope despite impossible odds. - A. David Lewis
Jonson, Ben. "On his First Son." Full text. "On My First Sonne", a poem by Ben Jonson, was written in 1603 and published in 1616 after the death of Jonson's first son Benjamin at the age of seven.-Wikipedia
Kadish, Rachel. The Weight of Ink. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017. In this meticulously researched historical novel, two contemporary researchers work to uncover the mysterious identity of a seventeenth century Jewish scribe/philosopher after discovering a trove of documents. Several pivotal chapters set during the plague years imagine the London Jewish community’s plague experience, which drastically alters the scribe’s life trajectory and provides commentary on parallel issues of sexuality, class, religion, and feminism in the researchers’ lives. - Akire Mary
Killian, Kevin. Argento Series. San Francisco: Krupskaya, 2001. Killian writes AIDS through the prism of the films of Dario Argento. - Jenny Davidson
King, Stephen. The Stand. New York: Doubleday, 1978. One man escapes from a biological weapon facility after an accident, carrying with him the deadly virus known as Captain Tripps, a rapidly mutating flu that - in the ensuing weeks - wipes out most of the world's population. In the aftermath, survivors choose between following an elderly black woman to Boulder or the dark man, Randall Flagg, who has set up his command post in Las Vegas. The two factions prepare for a confrontation between the forces of good and evil. - Stephen King
Kingsolver, Barbara. The Poisonwood Bible. Harper, 1998. "A story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. A suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa." --Amazon (One daughter, Adah Price eventually goes on to study viral epidemiology and work for the CDC in Atlanta, offering an extended meditation near the end of the novel on viral plagues, human infrastructure and mobility, and our fantasies of human exceptionalism.)
Kushner, Tony. Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. 1st ed. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1993. [HIV/AIDS] First performance: May 1991.
A two-part play that won numerous awards including the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Tony Award for Best Play, and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play … The play is a complex, often metaphorical, and at times symbolic examination of AIDS and homosexuality in America in the 1980s. Certain major and minor characters are supernatural beings (angels) or deceased persons (ghosts).- Wikipedia
Lai, Larissa. The Tiger Flu. Arsenal Pulp, 2018. In this visionary novel by Larissa Lai...a community of parthenogenic women, sent into exile by patriarchal and corporate Salt Water City, go to war against disease, technology, and an economic system that threatens them with extinction.
Kirilow is a doctor apprentice whose lover, Peristrophe, is a "starfish," a woman who can regenerate her own limbs and organs, which she uses to help her clone sisters whose organs are failing. When a denizen from Salt Water City suffering from a mysterious flu comes into their midst, Peristrophe becomes infected and dies, prompting Kirilow to travel to the city, where the flu is now a pandemic, to find a new starfish who will help save her sisters…. --description from publisher
Lam, Vincent. Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures: Stories. Anchor Canada, 2009. [SARS]
An astonishing literary debut centred around four students as they apply to medical school, qualify as doctors and face the realities of working in medicine, from a powerful voice in fiction. - publisher. It tracks these students as they are exposed to and experience SARS.
Larson, Jonathan. Rent. New York: Rob Weisbach Books, 1996. [HIV/AIDS]
Rent is a rock musical with music, lyrics, and book by Jonathan Larson, loosely based on Giacomo Puccini's 1896 opera La Bohème. It tells the story of a group of impoverished young artists struggling to survive and create a life in Lower Manhattan's East Village in the thriving days of bohemian Alphabet City, under the shadow of HIV/AIDS.-Wikipedia
Leveen, Lois. Juliet’s Nurse. Simon & Schuster, 2014. Imagining the fourteen years leading up to the events in “Romeo and Juliet” from the perspective of one of Shakespeare’s most comic, tragic, bawdy, and memorable characters, this novel explores life in Verona in the wake of the plague, as survivors come to terms with what it means to live when so many have died.
London, Jack. The Scarlet Plague. 1912. Full text.
Plague wipes out most of humanity, but one English professor survives to reboot culture as best he can.The Scarlet Plague, originally published by Jack London in 1912, was one of the first examples of a postapocalyptic fiction novel in modern literature. Set in a ravaged and wild America, the story takes place in 2073, sixty years after the spread of the Red Death, an uncontrollable epidemic that depopulated and nearly destroyed the world in 2013. One of the few survivors, James Howard Smith, alias “Granser,” tells his incredulous and near-savage grandsons how the pandemic spread in the world and about the reactions of the people to contagion and death. Even though it was published more than a century ago, The Scarlet Plague feels contemporary because it allows modern readers to reflect on the worldwide fear of pandemics, a fear that remains very much alive. - Riva M, Benedetti M, Cesana G. Pandemic Fear and Literature: Observations from Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague. Emerg Infect Dis. 2014;20(10):1753-1757. https://dx.doi.org/10.3201/eid2010.130278
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. Evangeline. 1847.William D. Ticknor & Co, 1847. The epic poem Evangeline describes the betrothal of a fictional Acadian girl named Evangeline Bellefontaine to her beloved, Gabriel Lajeunesse, and their separation as the British deport the Acadians from Acadie in the Great Upheaval. The poem then follows Evangeline across the landscapes of America as she spends years in a search for him, at some times being near to Gabriel without realizing he was near. Finally she settles in Philadelphia and, as an old woman, works as a Sister of Mercy among the poor. While tending the dying during an epidemic she finds Gabriel among the sick, and he dies in her arms. - Wikipedia
Ma, Ling. Severance. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018.
Candace barely notices when a plague of biblical proportions sweeps New York. Then Shen Fever spreads. Families flee. Companies cease operations. The subways screech to a halt. Her bosses enlist her as part of a dwindling skeleton crew with a big end-date payoff. Soon entirely alone, still unfevered, she photographs the eerie, abandoned city as the anonymous blogger NY Ghost…. - Amazon
MacDonald, Betty. The Plague and I. Harper Collins, 1948. [tuberculosis]
“Getting tuberculosis in the middle of your life is like starting downtown to do a lot of
urgent errands and being hit by a bus. When you regain consciousness you remember
nothing about the urgent errands. You can’t even remember where you were going.” Thus begins Betty MacDonald’s memoir of her year in a sanatorium just outside Seattle battling the “White Plague.” MacDonald uses her offbeat humor to make the most of her time in the TB sanatorium—making all of us laugh in the process. - publisher
Makkai, Rebekah. The Great Believers. New York: Viking, 2018. [AIDS]
Yale, a development director for an art gallery in Chicago, has a flourishing career, but his friends are dying of AIDS. Soon the only person he has left is Fiona. Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. While staying with an old friend, a famous photographer who documented the Chicago crisis, she finds herself finally grappling with the devastating ways AIDS affected her life and her relationship with her daughter. The two intertwining stories take us through the heartbreak of the eighties and the chaos of the modern world, as both Yale and Fiona struggle to find goodness in the midst of disaster. - abridged from publisher
Mann, Thomas. Death in Venice: A New Translation, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism. 1st ed. Norton Critical Edition. New York: WWNorton, 1994. [cholera]
Man decides to stay in Venice on vacation to watch a young boy with whom he is obsessed during a cholera pandemic.
---. The Magic Mountain. 1924. Vintage Edition, 1996. Trans. John E. Woods.
In this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Mann uses a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps–a community devoted exclusively to sickness–as a microcosm for Europe, which in the years before 1914 was already exhibiting the first symptoms of its own terminal irrationality. The Magic Mountain is a monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, a book that pulses with life in the midst of death. - publisher.
Manzoni, Alessandro. The Betrothed (I promessi sposi). D. Appleton, 1900.
Detailed description of 17th-century Italian cities stricken by plague, at the climax of a long tale of lovers kept apart by fate. - Jesse Raber
Maugham, W. Somerset. The Painted Veil. 1925. A recently married couple, a callow young woman and her bacteriologist/physician husband, are stationed in mainland China during a cholera outbreak. A heart-breaking look at love, relationships, self-knowledge, and sacrifice. The title is derived from a Percey Bysshe Shelley sonnet that begins with the line, “Lift not the painted veil which those who live / Call Life.”
Maxwell, William. They Came Like Swallows. Vintage, 2009. [influenza] Google preview.
To eight-year old Bunny Morison, his mother is an angelic comforter in whose absence nothing is real or alive. To his older brother, Robert, his mother is someone he must protect, especially since the deadly, influenza epidemic of 1918 is ravaging their small Midwestern town. To James Morison, his wife, Elizabeth, is the center of a life that would disintegrate all too suddenly were she to disappear. -publisher
McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. Vintage: 2006. The world has ended, maybe by nuclear holocaust, but the main characters do not know. The novel is about scarcity and suffering and the hope for survival. It also addresses religion, in the sense of what God exists in the midst of suffering.
Moraga, Cherríe. Heroes and Saints. West End Press, 1994. [AIDS] This searing play takes place in California's central valley where Mexican immigrants are employed at survival wages to work in fields poisoned by pesticides. One of the main characters, Cerezita, has only half a body, and often occupies center stage encased in an altar-like contraption where only her head shows. She seeks and finds intellectual companionship in the local priest who is struggling to find an appropriate way to minister to a parish divided among disillusioned cynics turned alcoholic, pious women who want nothing to do with politics, and the angry young, including one young homosexual who feels driven to leave a loving but uncomprehending family, and reveals to the priest that he has AIDS. The play culminates in a protest in which Cerezita and the priest are shot down and the young man with AIDS cries out for the community to burn the fields.- abridged from Marilyn McEntyre, LITMED: Literature and Arts Database.
Morales, Alejandro. The Rag Doll Plagues. ArtePublico, 1992. A mysterious plague is decimating the population of colonial Mexico. One of His Majesty’s highest physicians is dispatched from Spain to bring the latest advances in medical science to the backward peoples of the New World capital. Here begins the cyclical tale of man battling the unknown, of science confronting the eternally indifferent forces of nature. Morales takes us on a trip through ancient and future civilizations, through exotic but all-too-familiar cultures, to a final confrontation with our own ethics and world views. In later chapters, the colonial physician finds his successors as they once again engage in life or death struggles, attempting to balance their own hopes, desires and loves with the good society and the state. Book II of the novel takes place in modern-day southern California [in the midst of the HIV/AIDS epidemic] and Book III in a futuristic technocratic confederation known as Lamex.
Morrison, Toni. A Mercy. 1st ed., Knopf, 2008. Florens, a slave, lives and works on Jacob Vaark's rural New York farm. Lina, a Native American and fellow laborer on the Vaark farm, relates in a parallel narrative how she became one of a handful of survivors of a smallpox plague that destroyed her tribe. Vaark's wife Rebekka describes leaving England on a ship for the new world to be married to a man she has never seen. Vaark, himself an orphan and poorhouse survivor, describes his journeys from New York to Maryland and Virginia, commenting on the role of religion in the culture of the different colonies, along with their attitudes toward slavery. When smallpox threatens Rebekka's life, Florens, now 16, is sent to find a black freedman who has some knowledge of herbal medicines. Her journey is dangerous, ultimately proving to be the turning point in her life. - wikipedia
Mpe, Phaswane. Welcome to Our Hillbrow: A Novel of Postapartheid South Africa. Modern African Writing. Ohio University Press, 2011. Project Muse full text. An exhilarating and disturbing ride through the chaotic and hyper-real zone of Hillbrow—microcosm of all that is contradictory, alluring, and painful in the postapartheid South African psyche. Everything is there: the shattered dreams of youth, sexuality and its unpredictable costs, AIDS, xenophobia, suicide, the omnipotent violence that often cuts short the promise of young people’s lives, and the Africanist understanding of the life continuum that does not end with death but flows on into an ancestral realm. - publisher
Mullen, Thomas. The Last Town on Earth. New York: Random House, 2006. Set in a fictional mill town in Washington state in 1918 founded as a socialist commune, the town’s ideals are threatened by both the pro-war actions of the government and the fear of the townspeople about the Spanish flu.
Murphy, Pat. The City, Not Long After. New York: Doubleday, 1989. “After a deadly plague sweeps the world, toppling governments in its wake, a few surviving artists who have claimed San Francisco as their home wage an unorthodox war against an invading army intent on bringing the blessings of law and order to a community that has discovered a better way of life.”(from Library Journal)
Nashe, Thomas. “A Litany in Time of Plague.” 1592. Full text
Pepys, Samuel. Diary (1665-66). Full Text.
Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart. “Zerviah Hope.”Vol. 8. Scribner's, Nov. 1880. Full text.
A story about a yellow fever epidemic in Southern Carolina. Zerviah Hope travels south to nurse the dying. Also features Dr. Marian Dare (no onomastics involved, of course!) - Cécile Roudeau
Poe, Edgar Allan. “King Pest: A Tale Containing an Allegory.” Richmond, VA, 1835
[probably cholera, but not explicit] Full text.
———. “The Masque of the Red Death” Philadelphia, 1842. [black death/cholera, but not explicit] Full text.
———. “The Sphinx.” [cholera] Full text. “The Sphinx” is a short story about a man who decides to visit a relative living near the Hudson River north of New York City for two weeks during a cholera epidemic that occurred during the summer of 1832.
Porter, Katherine Anne. Pale Horse, Pale Rider; Three Short Novels. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1939. [Spanish flu] Full text. In “Noon Wine?” a family struggling to live on a farm in Texas is saved by the unexpected arrival of a mysterious stranger—only to have their world upended again by the arrival, nine years later, of a second stranger. The three parts of “Old Mortality” introduce the teenager Miranda and chronicle her journey of self-discovery, as she gradually realizes her family’s romantic nostalgia for her absent uncle and late aunt bears little resemblance to the truth. Miranda returns in the title story, “Pale Horse, Pale Rider.” She is now working as a drama critic for a newspaper in Denver, where she falls in love with a soldier, Adam, during the influenza epidemic of 1918. When Miranda falls ill, Adam cares for her until she is moved to a hospital. Throughout her ordeal, on everyone’s mind is “the war, the war, the WAR to end WAR, war for Democracy, for humanity, a safe world forever and ever.” - publisher
Preston, Richard. The Hot Zone: The Chilling True Story of an Ebola Outbreak. Random House, 2012. A highly infectious, deadly virus from the central African rain forest suddenly appears in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. There is no cure. In a few days 90 percent of its victims are dead. A secret military SWAT team of soldiers and scientists is mobilized to stop the outbreak of this exotic “hot” virus. The Hot Zone tells this dramatic story, giving a hair-raising account of the appearance of rare and lethal viruses and their “crashes” into the human race. Shocking, frightening, and impossible to ignore, The Hot Zone proves that truth really is scarier than fiction. - publisher
Robinson, Kim Stanley. The Years of Rice and Salt. New York: Bantam Books, 2002. An alternate history novel set in a world where the Black Death killed 99% of Europe’s population, leading to Islam and Buddhism becoming the dominant religions on Earth.
Roth, Philip. Nemesis. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010. [polio]
Set in a Newark neighborhood during a terrifying polio outbreak, Nemesis is a wrenching examination of the forces of circumstance on our lives. - publisher
Reed, Ishmael. Mumbo Jumbo. Doubleday, 1972.
In 1920s America, a plague is spreading fast. From New Orleans to Chicago to New York, the “Jes Grew” epidemic makes people desperate to dance, overturning social norms in the process. Anyone is vulnerable and when they catch it, they’ll bump and grind into a frenzy. Working to combat the Jes Grew infection are the puritanical Atonists, a group bent on cultivating a “Talking Android,” an African American who will infiltrate the unruly black communities and help crush the outbreak. But PaPa LaBas, a houngan voodoo priest, is determined to keep his ancient culture—including a key spiritual text—alive. Spanning a dizzying host of genres, from cinema to academia to mythology, Mumbo Jumbo is a lively ride through a key decade of American history. - publisher
Shiel, Matthew Phipps. The Purple Cloud. Penguin UK, 2012.
Spreading cloud of gas from the North Pole slowly annihilates humanity. Pandemic-like social responses. - Jesse Raber
Sjón. Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016. [1918 influenza]
Máni Steinn is queer in a society in which the idea of homosexuality is beyond the furthest extreme. His city, Reykjavik in 1918, is homogeneous and isolated and seems entirely defenseless against the Spanish flu, which has already torn through Europe, Asia, and North America and is now lapping up on Iceland's shores. And if the flu doesn't do it, there's always the threat that war will spread all the way north. And yet the outside world has also brought Icelanders cinema! And there's nothing like a dark, silent room with a film from Europe flickering on the screen to help you escape from the overwhelming threats--and adventures--of the night, to transport you, to make you feel like everything is going to be alright. For Máni Steinn, the question is whether, at Reykjavik's darkest hour, he should retreat all the way into this imaginary world, or if he should engage with the society that has so soundly rejected him. - publisher
Sophocles. Oedipus. FF Plays. London: Faber and Faber, 2008.
St John Mandel, Emily. Station Eleven. Picador, 2014. [influenza]
One snowy night in Toronto famous actor Arthur Leander dies on stage whilst performing the role of a lifetime. That same evening a deadly virus touches down in North America. The world will never be the same again. Twenty years later Kirsten, an actress in the Travelling Symphony, performs Shakespeare in the settlements that have grown up since the collapse. But then her newly hopeful world is threatened. - publisher
Saramago, José. Blindness. Harcourt Brace & Company, 1998.
A city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" which spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and raping women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides seven strangers—among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears—through the barren streets, and the procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing. A magnificent parable of loss and disorientation, Blindness has swept the reading public with its powerful portrayal of our worst appetites and weaknesses—and humanity's ultimately exhilarating spirit. - publisher
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. The Last Man. London: Henry Colburn, 1826. Full text
Post-apocalyptic science fiction novel [that…] tells of a future world that has been ravaged by a plague. - wikipedia
Stifter, Adalbert. Granite. Leipzig, 1853. On a walk, the grandfather of the protagonist tells him the story of a family of resin extractors' vain endeavour to escape and the rescue of two children...A resin extractor wanted to escape the oncoming plague and fled into the deep woods. - wikipedia
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. 1897. The titular character, Count Dracula, symbolizes a parasite on the move who eventually crosses the border into Britain. Published at a time when bacteriology and parasitology were beginning to be widely accepted.
Sue, Eugène. The Wandering Jew. Paris, 1844. [cholera]
About descendents trying to make their way back to Paris to claim a fortune while the “wandering jew,” who rarely appears, spreads cholera in his wake, destined to wander until all the whole family is dead. [NB: antisemitic and anti-Catholic]
Tāj al-Sirr, Amīr. Ebola ’76. London: Darf Publishers, 2015.
On a hot, humid August day in 1976, The Democratic Republic of Congo is the setting of the first major Ebola outbreak. Unfortunately, the outbreak is difficult to contain and control due to the squalid living conditions as a result of deep poverty, and the population's ignorance and apathy regarding the virus. These 2 factors help the Ebola strain to fester and spread to an epidemic affecting the city Kinshasa heavily. As luck would have it, an ordinary Sudanese factory worker by the name Lewis, who happened to stop through Kinshasa on his way back to his home, contracted the virus from an escort during an adulterous romp and consequently brought it back to his home in Nzara to subsequently spread like wildfire. The novel goes on and shows Ebola's path of destruction in Nzara through Lewis' social connections and its devastating effect on the town as a whole. - wikipedia
Tiptree, James Jr. "The Screwfly Solution." Analog Science Fiction and Fact (June 1977). a Science fiction short story by Raccoona Sheldon, a pen name for American psychologist Alice Sheldon, who was better known by her other nom de plume James Tiptree, Jr. It received the Nebula Award for Best Novelette. Aliens, hoping to depopulate and colonize the Earth, infect humanity with a pandemic disease that turns male sexual desire into an urge to kill women. - Jesse Raber
Voigt, Ellen Bryant. Kyrie: Poems. WW Norton, 1995. [influenza]
Her collection Kyrie (1995), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award, is a book-length sonnet sequence exploring the lives of people affected by the influenza epidemic of 1918–1919. - Poetry Foundation
Vaughn, Brian K., Pia Guerra, Goran Sudžuka, and Paul Chadwick. Y the Last Man Omnibus. Vertigo, 2019. In 2002, the world changes forever. Every man, every boy, every mammal with a Y chromosome everywhere on Earth suddenly collapses and dies. With the loss of nearly half the planet's population, the gears of society grind to a halt, and a world of women are left to pick up the pieces and try to keep civilization from collapsing entirely. The "gendercide," however, is not absolutely complete. For some unknown reason, one young man named Yorick Brown and his pet male monkey, Ampersand, are spared. Overnight, this anonymous twentysomething becomes the most important person on the planet--the key, it is hoped, to unlocking the secret of the mysterious sex-specific plague. - Amazon
Verghese, Abraham. My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story. Vintage, 1994 [AIDS] Nestled in the Smoky Mountains of eastern Tennessee, the town of Johnson City had always seemed exempt from the anxieties of modern American life. But when the local hospital treated its first AIDS patient, a crisis that had once seemed an “urban problem” had arrived in the town to stay. Working in Johnson City was Abraham Verghese, a young Indian doctor specializing in infectious diseases. Dr. Verghese became by necessity the local AIDS expert, soon besieged by a shocking number of male and female patients whose stories came to occupy his mind, and even take over his life. - Amazon
Von Reizenstein, Baron Ludwig. The Mysteries of New Orleans. JHU Press, [1854-55] 2002. [yellow fever]
Reizenstein crafted a daring occult novel that stages a frontal assault on the ethos of the antebellum South. His plot imagines the coming of a bloody, retributive justice at the hands of Hiram the Freemason—a nightmarish, 200-year-old, proto-Nietzschean superman—for the sin of slavery. Heralded by the birth of a black messiah, the son of a mulatto prostitute and a decadent German aristocrat, this coming revolution is depicted in frankly apocalyptic terms. - publisher
Yan, Lianke. Dream of Ding Village. Melbourne: Text Publishing Company, 2010. [HIV/AIDS]
As the book opens, Ding Village’s town directors, looking for a way to lift their village from poverty, decide to open a dozen blood-plasma collection stations. The directors hope to drain the townspeople of their blood and sell it to villages near and far. The novel focuses on one family, destroyed when one son rises to the top of the Party as he exploits the situation, while another is infected and dies. Based on a real-life blood-selling scandal in eastern China, the novel is the result of three years of undercover work by Lianke, who once worked as an assistant to a well-known Beijing anthropologist in an effort to study a small village decimated by HIV/AIDS as a result of unregulated blood selling. The result is a passionate and steely critique of the rate at which China is developing—and what happens to those who get in the way. - publisher
Yoshimura, Akira. Shipwrecks. [1992] Translated from Japanese by Mark Ealey. Harvest Books 1996. Slim novel by a Japanese author. In the 18th century, a coastal village lights fires to lure ships to crash on rocky shoals and plunder their contents. Their latest “catch” contains much more than they bargain for, an infectious cargo that spreads through the village, afflicting the townspeople and wreaking havoc on the community. Written in a terse and spare fashion, a haunting morality tale with a Gothic tone.
Walker, Karen Thompson. The Dreamers: A Novel. Random House, 2019.
A campus novel-cum-plague narrative, The Dreamers centers around Mei, a first year at a small Southern California college, navigating the panic and social intricacies of quarantine from a disease that makes the victim drift into a permanent state of sleep.
Wang Lixiong 王力雄, Huanghuo 黃禍 (Yellow Peril), Hong Kong: Fengyun shi dai
chubangongsi, 1991 (banned in mainland China). English translation: China Tidal Wave: A Novel. Brill/Global Oriental,2008. Wang’s dystopian vision describes a series of catastrophes caused by a widespread flooding of the Yellow River after a twofold typhoon. Overpopulation, climate change, the rebellion of separatist provinces, the rise of an extremist environmental organization, and the invasion of the Taiwanese army herald a nuclear disaster (description from https://blog.degruyter.com/chinese-science-fiction/)
Wharton, Edith. “Roman Fever” [1934] Roman Fever and Other Stories. Collier, 1997. The
“Roman fever” threatens three generations of American women. Metaphoric use of the “Roman fever as sexual transgression.
Whitehead, Colson. Zone One. Penguin Random House, 2011. A pandemic has devastated the planet, sorting humanity into two types: the uninfected and the infected, the living and the living dead. After the worst of the plague is over, armed forces stationed in Chinatown’s Fort Wonton have successfully reclaimed the island south of Canal Street—aka Zone One. Mark Spitz is a member of one of the three-person civilian sweeper units tasked with clearing lower Manhattan of the remaining feral zombies. Zone One unfolds over three surreal days in which Spitz is occupied with the mundane mission of straggler removal, the rigors of Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder (PASD), and the impossible task of coming to terms with a fallen world. And then things start to go terribly wrong… - publisher
Wideman, John Edgar. The Cattle Killing. Houghton Mifflin, 1996.
In plague-ridden eighteenth-century Philadelphia, a young itinerant black preacher searches for a mysterious, endangered African woman. His struggle to find her and save them both plummets them both into the nightmare of a society violently splitting itself into white and black. Spiraling outward from the core image of a cattle killing--the Xhosa people's ritual destruction of their herd in a vain attempt to resist European domination--the novel expands its narrator's search for meaning and love into the America, Europe and South Africa of yesterday and today. - summary by Jenny Davidson
Also, by Wideman, the short story "Fever" in Fever and Other Stories, Penguin Books; First Edition edition, 1990. also set in plague-ridden 18th-c Philadelphia, about the black attendant to a white doctor tending to the ill. - Judith Frank
Willis, Connie. The Doomsday Book, Bantam Books1992. A time-traveling research historian from 2045 is erroneously deposited in mid-14th century England and endures the horrors of the bubonic plague in this long but carefully plotted science fiction novel, which won the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards. - David Elkin
Wojnarowicz, David. 7 Miles a Second Fantagraphics Books, 2013. [AIDS]
7 Miles a Second is the story of legendary artist David Wojnarowicz, written during the last years before his AIDS-related death in 1992. Artists James Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook unsentimentally depict Wojnarowicz's childhood of hustling on the streets of Manhattan, through his adulthood living with AIDS, and his anger at the indifference of government and health agencies. A primal scream of a graphic novel, 7 Miles a Second blends the stark reality of Lower East Side street life with a psychedelic delirium that artfully conveys Wojnarowicz's sense of rage, urgency, mortality and a refusal to be silent. - publisher
Yan Lianke 阎连科, Dingzhuang meng 丁庄梦 (Dream of Ding village). Shanghai wenyi
chubanshe, 2006. English translation: Dream of Ding Village. Translated by Cindy Carter. GroveAtlantic, 2012. Based on a real-life blood-selling scandal in eastern China, the novel is the result of three years of undercover work by Yan Lianke, who once worked as an assistant to a well-known Beijing anthropologist in an effort to study a small village decimated by HIV/AIDS as a result of unregulated blood selling. The result is a passionate and steely critique of the rate at which China is developing—and what happens to those who get in the way. (description from: https://groveatlantic.com/book/dream-of-ding-village/)
History/Primary Sources/Databases
Allen, Richard. The Life, Experience, and Gospel Labours of the Rt. Rev. Richard Allen. To Which is Annexed the Rise and Progress of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States of America. Containing a Narrative of the Yellow Fever in the Year of Our Lord 1793: With an Address to the People of Colour in the United States. Philadelphia: Martin & Boden, Printers, 1833. Full text.
Bevan, Aneurin, "A Bill for a National Health Service.” House of Commons Debates, 30 April 1946. Extract from Health: A Reader. Fountainhead: Southlake, TX, 2013. Ed. and Sujata Iyengar and Allison K. Lenhardt. Full text
Beveridge, Sir William. Social Insurance and Allied Services, aka The Beveridge Report, November 1942. Set the foundations of the British social welfare state, includes a section on “comprehensive health and rehabilitation services”
Bezio, Kelly. Collection of primary sources for nineteenth-century quarantine narratives.
“Founders Online: From Alexander Hamilton to the College of Physicians, [11 Sept ….” Accessed March 12, 2020.
Carey, Mathew. A Short Account of the Malignant Fever, Lately Prevalent in Philadelphia, Philadelphia: printed by the author, Nov. 23, 1793 (2nd edition), Jan. 16, 1794 (4th edition).
Curries, William. “A treatise on the synochus icteroides, or yellow fever.” Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson, 1794.
Deveze, Jean. An Enquiry into, and Observations Upon the Causes and Effects of the Epidemic Disease, Which Raged in Philadelphia from the Month of August Till Towards the Middle of December, 1793. Philadelphia: Parent, 1794.
Frazier, Frances N. The true story of Kaluaikoolau as told by his wife, Piilani. Kauai Historical Society, 2001. [leprosy]
Helmuth, J. Henry."A Short Account of the Yellow Fever in Philadelphia, for the Reflecting Christians.” Trans. Charles Erdmann. Philadelphia: Jones, Hoff, and Derrick, 1794.
Influenza Encyclopedia. Resources from the 1918 Influenza epidemic.
Jones, Absalom and Richard Allen. A narrative of the proceedings of the black people during the late awful calamity in Philadelphia in... 1793, and a refutation of some censures thrown upon them in some late publications. Philadelphia, 1794. Full text.
León-Portilla, Miguel, editor. The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico. (Visión de los vencidos: Relaciones indígenas de la conquista.) Beacon Press. (From Wikipedia:) León-Portilla translated selections of Nahuatl-language accounts of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. First published in Spanish in 1959, and in English in 1962. Most recent English edition published 2007. Includes "The Plague Ravages the City," a chronicle of the effect of disease and war upon Tenochtitlan.
Luther, Martin. "Whether one may flee from a deadly plague." Luther’s Works: Devotional Writings 2.43 (1989): 113-38. [1527]
Mather, Cotton. Wholesome Words: A Visit of Advice, Given Unto Families that are Visited with Sickness; by a Pastoral Letter, Briefly Declaring the Duties Incumbent on All Persons in the Families, that Have Any Sick Persons in Them. D. Henchman, 1713.
Minutes of the Proceedings of the Committee . . . to Attend to and Alleviate the Sufferings of the Afflicted with the Malignant Fever, Prevalent, in the City and Its Vicinity, With an Appendix. Philadelphia: R. Aitken, 1794.
Morello, Stefano. “The Lung Block” [tuberculosis] A collection of materials on tuberculosis in New York.
Rush, Benjamin. “An Account of the Bilious Remitting Yellow Fever.” Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson, 1794.
Stark, Rodney, The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996): Chapter 4: “Epidemics, Networks, and Conversion,” 73-94.
Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. Book II, Chapter VII includes an account of "The Plague of Athens." (Full text available here and here.)
Totaro, Rebecca. The Plague in Print: Essential Elizabethan Sources, 1558-1603. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2010. [No e-book available, unfortunately, but I know some of these sources are available freely online and will add them as I find them. - Sujata Iyengar]
Winchester, Elhanan. Taught by Man’s Mortality; Or, the Shortness and Uncertainty of Life: Adapted to the Awful Visitation of the City of Philadelphia, by the Yellow Fever, in the Year 1793. Philadelphia: R. Folwell, 1795.
Literature/Secondary Sources
[Book titles are linked to publisher’s websites which include abstracts.]
Ahuja, Neel. Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species. Duke University Press, 2016. Google books partial view.
Altschuler, Sari. “The Gothic Origins of Global Health.” American Literature 89, no. 3 (Sept 2017): 557-590. Abstract.
Coetzee, J. M. “On the Moral Brink,” The New York Review of Books, October 28, 2010.
Covid-19 Forum, essays by a collection of historians and anthropologists, Somatosphere: Science, Medicine, and Anthropology.
Crain, Caleb. “Pox: On ‘Contagion.’” The Paris Review (blog), September 12, 2011.
Crewe, Tom. “Here Was a Plague.” London Review of Books (review essay of several books on AIDS), September 27, 2018.
Davis, Cynthia J. Bodily and Narrative Forms: The Influence of Medicine on American Literature, 1845-1915. Stanford UP, 2000.
“Decameron Web | Plague.” Italian Studies, Brown University. Multi-disciplinary resource of primary sources related to the plague: contemporary accounts, mapping, images, etc.
Garner Jr, Stanton B. "Artaud, germ theory, and the theatre of contagion." Theatre Journal (2006): 1-14. JSTOR link.
Gilbert, Pamela K. Cholera and Nation. SUNY Press, 2008.
Hájková, Anna. “Medicine in Theresienstadt,” Social History of Medicine 33,1 (February 2020): 79-105.
Gilman, Ernest B. Plague Writing in Early Modern England. University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Kelly, Kathleen Coyne. “Flea and ANT: Mapping the mobility of the Plague, 1330s–1350s.” postmedieval 4.2 (2013): 219-32.
Kitta, Andrea. The Kiss of Death: Contagion, Contamination, and Folklore. University Press of Colorado, 2019. Full text and teaching resources.
Lee, Haiyan. "Animals Are Us." In The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination. Stanford University Press, 2014. MacKay, Ellen. Persecution, Plague, and Fire: Fugitive Histories of the Stage in Early Modern England. University of Chicago Press, 2011.
Oldenburg, Scott. A Weaver-Poet and the Plague: Labor, Poverty, and the Household in Shakespeare’s London. Penn State University Press, 2020.
Ostherr, Kirsten. Cinematic Prophylaxis: Globalization and Contagion in the Discourse of World Health. Duke University Press, 2005.
Otis, Laura. Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-century Literature, Science, and Politics. JHU Press, 1999.
Outka, Elizabeth. Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature. Columbia University Press, 2019.
Carlos Rojas, Homesickness: Culture, Contagion, and National Transformation in Modern
China. Harvard University Press, 2015.
Rütten, Thomas, and King, Martina. Contagionism and Contagious Diseases: Medicine and Literature 1880-1933. Spectrum Literaturwissenschaft / Spectrum Literature 38. Walter De Gruyter, 2014.
Silva, Cristobal. Miraculous Plagues: An Epidemiology of Early New England Narrative. New York ; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Sodikoff, Genese Marie. “Multispecies Epidemiology and the Viral Subject.” In The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities. London; New York: Routledge, 2017.
Spires, Derrick R. “Neighborly Citizenship in Absalom Jones and Richard Allen’s A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People During the Late and Awful Calamity in Philadelphia in the Year 1793.” In The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.
Thornber, Karen Laura. Global Healing. Brill Rodopi, 2020. Full text. Brill has generously made this book freely available. [Leprosy, AIDS, dementia, chronic diseases, end-of-life decisions and care, patient-centered care, etc]
Troppe, Marie. Black Benefactors and White Recipients: Counternarratives of Benevolence in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. 2012. University of Maryland, PhD dissertation.Chapter one covers The Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People by Jones and Allen.
Vrettos, Athena. Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995
Wald, Priscilla. Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. Full text. [Duke UP has generously made this book freely available because of Covid-19. See also Duke UP’s syllabus of freely available books related to pandemics.]
Cultural Studies/Theory
[Book titles are linked to publisher’s websites which include abstracts.]
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “The Case for Contamination.” The New York Times, January 1, 2006, sec. Magazine.
Bailey, Kenneth, and Lori Lobenstine. “Social Justice in a Time of Social Distancing.”
Bashford, Alison, and Claire Hooker. Contagion: Historical and Cultural Studies. Routledge Studies in the Social History of Medicine 15. London ; New York: Routledge, 2001.
Biss, Eula. On Immunity: An Inoculation. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 2014.
Cartwright, Lisa. 2012. “How to Have Social Media in an Invisible Pandemic: Hepatitis C in the Time of H1N1.” In Kelly Gates and Angharad Valdivia, Media Studies Futures, International Encyclopedia of Media Studies Vol. VI, Blackwell. Abstract.
Chigudu, Simukai. The Political Life of an Epidemic: Cholera, Crisis and Citizenship in Zimbabwe. Cambridge University Press, 2020.
Cohen, Ed. A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body. Duke University Press, 2009. Full text.
---. ‘The Paradoxical Politics of Viral Containment; or, How Scale Undoes Us One and All’. Social Text (2011) 29 (1 (106)): 15–35. Full text.
Dolmage, Jay Timothy. Disabled Upon Arrival: Eugenics, Immigration, and the Construction of Race and Disability. OSU Press, 2018. [Features chapters on Ellis Island and Pier 21 and the public health measures undertaken there to screen “contaminated” immigrants]
Goldstein, Diane. Once Upon a Virus: AIDS Legends and Vernacular Risk Perception. Utah State UP, 2004. Full text.
Harrison, Mark. Contagion: How Commerce Has Spread Disease. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012.
Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve. Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You. In Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Duke University Press, 2003: 123–151.
Kucharski, Adam. The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread and Why They Stop. Blackwell, 2020.
Mitchell, Peta. “Geographies/Aerographies of Contagion,”Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 29 (2011): 533-550.
Mitropoulos, Angela. Contact & Contagion. Minor Compositions, 2012.
Nixon, Kari, and Servitje, Lorenzo. Endemic: Essays in Contagion Theory. Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2016.
Patton, Cindy. Globalizing AIDS. Minneapolis, Minn: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.
Pernick, Martin S. "Contagion and culture." American Literary History 14.4 (2002): 858-865.
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford, 1987.
Sampson, Tony D. Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.
Sontag, Susan. AIDS and Its Metaphors. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989.
———. Illness as Metaphor. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978.
———. Regarding the Pain of Others. Picador, 2004.
Stearns, Justin K. Infectious Ideas: Contagion in Premodern Islamic and Christian Thought in the Western Mediterranean. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011.
Treichler, Paula A. How to have theory in an epidemic: Cultural chronicles of AIDS. Duke
University Press, 1999.
History/Secondary Sources
[Book titles are/will be linked to publisher’s websites which include abstracts.]
Alchon, Suzanne. A Pest in the Land: New World Epidemics in a Global Perspective. University of New Mexico Press, 2003.
Amster, Ellen. Medicine and the Saints: Science, Islam, and the Colonial Encounter in Morocco, 1877-1956. University of Texas Press, 2013.
Anderson, Warwick. Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines. Duke University Press, 2006. (racism and public health, notions of public space, includes photography)
Apel, Thomas. Feverish Bodies, Enlightened Minds: Science and the Yellow Fever Controversy in the Early American Republic. Stanford University Press, 2016.
Barry, John M. The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History. New York: Penguin Books, 2005.
Bashford, Alison. Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism, and Public Health. Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Beattie, James. Empire and Environmental Anxiety, 1800-1920: Health, Science, Art and Conservation in South Asia and Australasia. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011 and 2016.
__, ‘Imperial Landscapes of Health: Place, Plants and People between India and Australia, 1800s-1900s’, Health & History. 14.1 (2012): 100-120.
---, ‘Colonial Geographies of Settlement: Vegetation, Towns, Disease and WellBeing in Aotearoa/New Zealand, 1830s-1930s’, Environment and History 14.4 (November, 2008): 583-610.
---, 'A "shock which … can scarcely be understood": Health panics, migration and plant exchange between India and Australia post-1857', in Robert Peckham, ed., Empires of Panic: Epidemics and Colonial Anxieties. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2015, 87-110.
Bourdain, Anthony. Typhoid Mary: An Urban Historical. New York: Bloomsbury : St. Martin’s Press, 2001.
Brandt, Allan M. No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States since 1880. Oxford University Press, USA, 1987.
Brazelton, Mary Augusta. Mass Vaccination: Citizens' Bodies and State Power in Modern China. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019.
Bristow, Nancy. American Pandemic: The Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic. Oxford, 2012.
Cantor, Norman. In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made. HarperCollins, 2001. Internet archive access.
Carmichael, Ann G. "The last past plague: the uses of memory in Renaissance epidemics." Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 53.2 (1998): 132-160. First page and OUP access.
Chase, Marilyn. The Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco. New York: Random House, 2003.
Cohn, Samuel K. Epidemics: Hate and Compassion from the Plague of Athens to AIDS. Oxford University Press, 2018.
Cook, Noble David. Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492-1650. Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. [Take this with a grain of salt -- many of the claims are exaggerated--David Jones]
Coss, Stephen. The Fever of 1721: The Epidemic That Revolutionized Medicine and American Politics. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2016.
Crosby, Alfred W. America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918. 2nd ed. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Crosby, Alfred. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. Greenwood, 1972. Praeger, 2003. Foundational work of environmental history, includes the chapter "Conquistador y Pestilencia" on virgin soil diseases in the Americas.
Crosby, Molly Caldwell. The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, the Epidemic That Shaped Our History. 1st ed. New York: Berkley Books, 2006.
Downs, Jim. Sick from freedom: African-American illness and suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Oxford University Press, 2012.
Evans, Richard J. Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years, 1830-1910. Oxford University Press, 1987.
Farmer, Paul. “Ebola, the Spanish Flu, and the Memory of Disease.” Critical Inquiry 46, no. 1 (Autumn 2019): 56-70.
Fenn, Elizabeth A. Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82. 1st ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 2001.
Fink, Sherrie. Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital. New York: Crown, 2013.
Finger, Simon. The Contagious City: The Politics of Public Health in Early Philadelphia. Cornell University Press, 2012.
Flaherty, Anna. The Outsiders. Serial, Digital “Stories,” Wellcome Medical Library.
From the tag-line: “Six people, six illnesses, six different places and times. United by one story about how our response to infectious diseases – like syphilis, bubonic plague and cholera – is shaped by social forces.” Full text
France, David. How to Survive a Plague: The Story of How Activists and Scientists Tamed AIDS. Penguin: 2017. [AIDS] Based on a 2012 documentary, a detailed look at the interplay between scientific and political forces that sprang up in response to the AIDS epidemic.
Hájková, Anna. "Medicine in Theresienstadt." Social History of Medicine 33.1 (2020): 79-105.
Healy, Margaret. Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England: Bodies, Plagues and Politics. Springer, 2001.
Honigsbaum, Mark. The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris. Norton, 2019.
---. Living with Enza: The Forgotten Story of Britain and the Great Flu Pandemic of 1918. Palgrave, 2009.
---. A History of the Great Influenza Pandemics: Death, Panic and Hysteria, 1830-1920. IB Tauris, 2014.
---. The Fever Trail: In Search of the Cure for Malaria. Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2003.
Hogarth, Rana. Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017.
---. "The Myth of Innate Racial Differences Between White and Black People’s Bodies: Lessons From the 1793 Yellow Fever Epidemic in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.” American Journal of Public Health (October 2019). Full text.
Hoppe, Trevor. Punishing Disease: HIV and the Criminalization of Sickness. Univ of California Press, 2017.
Johnson, Steven. The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. New York: Riverhead Books, 2006. Johnson documents the birth of the science of epidemiology and the way a London doctor (John Snow) and local clergyman (Henry Whitehead) worked together to map the spread of cholera in 1854 London, scientific method and local knowledge collaboratively solving a problem together. Beyond collecting data to determine that they were dealing with a waterborne pathogen, the two also needed to work through false assumptions supported by miasma theorists before they were able to effect a change in public policy (shutting off a well) and to improve sanitation systems (building sewers). In this drama, Johnson portrays the city as both cause and cure and cholera as the anti-hero.
Jones, David S. “History in Crisis--Lessons for Covid-19.” New England Journal of Medicine. (March 12, 2020) Full text.
---. Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality since 1600.
Harvard, 2004.
---. “Virgin Soils Revisited,” William and Mary Quarterly (October 2003), 703-742.
Keck, Frederic. Avian Reservoirs: Virus Hunters and Birdwatchers in Chinese Sentinel Posts. Durham, NC: Duke, 2020.
Kent, Susan. The Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919: A Brief History with Documents.
Kiechle, Melanie A. "'Health is Wealth': Valuing Health in the Nineteenth-Century
United States,"Journal of Social History, pre-published online 28 Nov
2019.
King, Helen. “Poems on Plagues: Thomas Sprat and the Later History of the Plague of Athens” Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh (December 17, 2018).
Leung, Angela, and Charlotte Furth, eds. Health and Hygiene in Chinese East Asia: Policies and Publics in the Long 20th Century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
Lynteris, Christos. Human Extinction and the Pandemic Imaginary. Routledge, 2020.
Manela, Erez. “A Pox on Your Narrative: Writing Disease Control into Cold War History” from Diplomatic History, Volume 34, Issue 2 (April 2010).
McMillen, Christian. Pandemics: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, 2016.
McNeill, William. Plagues and Peoples. Anchor, 1998.
McNeill, J.R. Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914.
Minardi, Margot. "The Boston Inoculation Controversy of 1721-1722: An Incident in the History of Race.” William and Mary Quarterly (January 2004).
Oshinsky, David M. Polio: An American Story. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Olivarius, Kathryn. "Immunity, Capital, and Power in Antebellum New Orleans," American Historical Review 124, no. 2 (April 2019): 425-455
Peckham, Robert. "COVID-19 and the anti-lessons of history." The Lancet (March 2, 2020).
---. Epidemics in Modern Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
---, editor. Empires of Panic: Epidemics and Colonial Anxieties, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2015.
Power, J. Gerard. Media Dependency, Bubonic Plague, and the Social Construction of the Chinese Other. Journal of Communication Inquiry 19, no. 1 (Spring 1995):89-110.
History of the quarantining of San Francisco’s Chinatown in the early 1900s, generally considered to have been an ethical and poorly executed quarantine. Focuses on analysis of print media and the interdependency of media and medicine. [Ariel Cascio]
Randall, David K. Black Death at the Golden Gate: The Race to Save America from the Bubonic Plague. First edition. New York: WWNorton & Company, 2019.
Risse, Guenter B. Plague, Fear, and Politics in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012.
Roberts, Mary Louise. “The Price of Discretion: Prostitution, Venereal Disease, and the American Military in France, 1944-1946,” American Historical Review 115, no. 4 (2010): 1002-1030.
Rogaski, Ruth, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China. University of California Press, 2004.
Rosenberg, Charles E. The Cholera Years:The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Shah, Nayan. Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
Snowden, Frank. Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present. Yale, 2019.
---. The Conquest of Malaria: Italy, 1900-1962. Yale, 2006.
---. Naples in the Time of Cholera, 1884-1911. Cambridge, 1995.
Spinney, Laura. Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World. (New York: Public Affairs/Hachette, 2017). Full text
Steere-Williams, Jacob. “Coolie Control: State Surveillance and the Labour of Disinfection Across the Late Victorian Empire,” in Making Surveillance States (University of Toronto Press, 2019), 35-57.
Shilts, Randy. And the Band Played on: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic. Power and Morality Collection at Harvard Business School. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987.
Smith, Billy G. Ship of Death: A Voyage that Changed the Atlantic World. Yale, 2013.
Tomes, Nancy. The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1998.
---. "“Destroyer and Teacher”: Managing the Masses During the 1918–1919 Influenza Pandemic." Public Health Reports 125.3_suppl (2010): 48-62.
---. "The Making of a Germ Panic, Then and Now." American Journal of Public Health 90.2 (2000): 191.
Taubenberger, Jeffrey K. and David M. Morens. “1918 Influenza: The Mother of All Pandemics.” Emerging Infectious Diseases 12.1 (2006). 15-22.
Valencius, Conevery Bolton. The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land. New York: Basic Books, 2002.
Varlik, Nukhet.Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347-1600. Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Vann, Michael G. “Hanoi in the Time of Cholera: Epidemic Disease and Racial Power in the Colonial City” in Laurence Monnais and Harold J. Cook (eds.), Global Movements, Local Concerns: Medicine and Health in Southeast Asia. Singapore: National University Singapore Press, 2012.
---. “Of le Cafard and Other Tropical Diseases: Perceived Threats to White Colonial Culture in Indochina” in Jennifer Yee (ed.), France and ‘Indochina:’ Cultural Representations. Lexington, 2005.
Vargha, Dora. Polio across the Iron Curtain: Hungary's Cold War with an Epidemic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. [PDF edition posted on the Exeter website]
Wallace, Rob. Big Farms Create Big Flu: Dispatches on Infectious Disease, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science. Monthly Review Press, 2016.
Wallace, Sarah Isabel. Not Fit to Stay: Public Health Panics and South Asian Exclusion. UBC Press, 2017.
Whooley, Owen. Knowledge in the Time of Cholera: The Struggle over American Medicine in the Nineteenth Century. University of Chicago Press, 2013.
Philosophy
Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal has a recent special issue on Coronavirus: KIEJ Special Issue on Ethics, Pandemics, and COVID-19
Steel, R., Buchak, L., & Eyal, N. (2020). Why continuing uncertainties are no reason to postpone challenge trials for coronavirus vaccines. Journal of Medical Ethics.
Boyd, K. (2020). Ethics in a time of coronavirus. Journal of Medical Ethics, 46(5), 285-286.
Jeffrey K. Aronson, Daniel Auker-Howlett, Virginia Ghiara, Michael P. Kelly and Jon Williamson:The use of mechanistic reasoning in assessing coronavirus interventions, Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, 2020. doi: 10.1111/jep.13438
Aquino YSJ, Cabrera N “Hydroxychloroquine and COVID-19: critiquing the impact of disease public profile on policy and clinical decision-making” Journal of Medical Ethics Published Online First: 09 July 2020. doi: 10.1136/medethics-2020-106306
American Journal of Bioethics: hosted a webinar on Black Bioethics: Racism, Police Brutality, and What it Means for Black Health
To view the recording that includes an audio transcript and closed captioning, please visit https://bit.ly/2DMU8aR. To view a shareable version, please view it via YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xOaLMYVRW8
M. Foucault, G. Agamben, J.L. Nancy, R. Esposito, S. Benvenuto, D. Dwivedi, S. Mohan, R. Ronchi, M. de Carolis; “Coronavirus and philosophers.” European Journal of Psychoanalysis, Published by I.S.A.P. - ISSN 2284-1059. Anthology of excerpts of key texts by philosophers on virus and contagion.
Gatta, Giunia, "Suffering and the making of politics: perspectives from Jaspers and Camus." Contemporary Political Theory. 14 (2015): 335–354.
Nail, Thomas. “Why a Roman philosopher’s views on the fear of death matter as coronavirus spreads.” The Conversation. (March 12, 2020)
“Quarantine Journal.” The Point: A Magazine of the Examined Life. Anthology of reflections/reports on quarantined life at the current moment.
Religion
Allen, Peter L. The Wages of Sin: Sex and Disease, Past and Present. University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966). Full text.
Goodwin, Megan and Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst. Religion in the Time of Corona, Keeping It 101: The Podcast, A Killjoy’s Introduction to Religion. Episode on religion, religious change, and the COVID-19 virus as well as remote teaching and #PandemicPedagogy.
Kinnear, “Propitiating the Plague Spirits,” China Medical Missionary Journal 26, 4, 1902, 204–206.
Murison, Justine S. "Obeah and its others: buffered selves in the era of tropical medicine." Atlantic Studies 12.2 (2015): 144-159.
Parker, Robert. Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion. Oxford U Press, 1966.
Paton, Diana. "Obeah Acts: Producing and Policing the Boundaries of Religion in the Caribbean." Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 13.1 (2009): 1-18.
Petro, Anthony Michael. After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion. Oxford University Press, USA, 2015.
Ricoeur, Paul. The Symbolism of Evil. [1960] Translated from the French by Emerson Buchanan. Boston: Beacon Press, 1967. Google books preview.
Vicini, Andrea, “Life in the Time of Coronavirus,” La Civiltà Cattolica 4, no. 4 (2020).
Art History
Bailey, Gauvin A., et al. Hope and Healing: Painting in Italy in a Time of Plague, 1500-1800. Clark University : College of the Holy Cross : Worcester Art Museum ; Distributed by University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Holochwost, Catherine. “The Paradoxical Pleasures of Asher B. Durand’s Ariadne,” American Art 27 (Fall 2013): 84-105. Situates Durand’s painting in the context of the reformer Sylvester Graham and the 1831-32 cholera epidemic, arguing that it enacted a process of temptation and struggle that was central to Graham’s philosophies. The article also connects the viscous and sensual materiality of the painted Ariadne to a broader discourse of overflow, containment, and self-control in the transatlantic visual culture of cholera in the 1830s.
“Miraculous Images and Contemporary Meaning-Making” - YouTube conversation: https://youtu.be/P5liaGztCiw
Short Takes/Teachable Interviews, Articles, Podcasts, and Websites
On the Coronavirus/Covid-19, the broader history of pandemics, history of science/medicine, etc.
Conversation with Erika Lee, “When Xenophobia Spreads Like A Virus” from CodeSwitch podcast from NPR
van Dooren, Thom. “Pangolins and Pandemics: The Real Source of this Crisis is Human, not Animal” (March 22, 2020) from New Matilda.
Fumian, Marco. "To Serve the People or the Party: Fang Fang’s Wuhan Diary and Chinese
Writers at the Time of Coronavirus." MCLC Resource Center Publication (April 2020).
Goodwin, Megan and Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst. Religion in the Time of Corona, Keeping It 101: The Podcast, A Killjoy’s Introduction to Religion. Episode on religion, religious change, and the COVID-19 virus as well as remote teaching and #PandemicPedagogy.
Ivakhiv, Adrian. “Pandemic Politics: On Disaster Capitalism, Socialism, and Environmentalism” (March 30, 2020) from Immanence: Ecoculture, Geophilosophy, Mediapolitics.
Lepore, Jill. “What Our Contagion Fables Are Really About.” The New Yorker. 23 March 2020. “In the literature of pestilence, the greatest threat isn’t the loss of human life but the loss of what makes us human.”
Interview with historian Natalia Molina, “Why pandemics activate xenophobia”(March 4, 2020) from Vox
Myhre, Kyle “Guante” Tran. “Thanos was the Villain: On COVID-19 and Eco-Fascism” (March 19, 2020) from guante.info.
Olivarius, Kathryn.”The Dangerous History of Immunoprivilege” The New York Times, April 12, 2020.
Ostherr, Kirsten. “Movies have perpetuated racist ideas about illness for more than a century.” Washington Post (March 17, 2020).
Alex Pareene, “The Dismantled State Takes on a Pandemic” (March 12, 2020) from The New Republic (recommended by Heather Cox Richardson on how the efforts of American conservatives to contract the state have shaped this moment)
Robbins, Jim. “The Ecology of Disease” (July 14, 2012) from The New York Times.
Roy, Arundhati. "The pandemic is a portal," Financial Times. April 3, 2020. The novelist on how coronavirus threatens India — and what the country, and the world, should do next.
Schallace, Brandi and Carusi, Annamaria, “Coronavirus - bodies, environments and the spread of disease.” An examination of the humanities and the broader perspective of the social context for disease, including emerging infectious agents. BMJ Talks Medicine Podcast. March 26, 2020. (Soundcloud)
Scheurer, Erika. "A lesson in self-isolation from Emily Dickinson," Minnesota Star Tribune. April 2, 2020.
Shah, Sonia. “Think Exotic Animals Are to Blame for the Coronavirus? Think Again” (February 18, 2020) from The Nation.
Sinha, Anoushka. “King Lear Under COVID-19 Lockdown.” JAMA. Published online April 10, 2020. A personal close reading of King Lear by a pediatrics resident living in NYC. Ideas of suffering, communality, and our mutable perception of the world under duress.
Audio interview with historian Frank Snowden on NPR, “Infections Diseases Show Societies Who They Really Are” (March 6, 2020)—he’s author of Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present
Interview with Frank Snowden, “How Pandemics Change History” (March 3, 2020), The New Yorker
Vidal, John. “‘Tip of the Iceberg’: Is Our Destruction of Nature Responsible for Covid-19?” (March 18, 2020) from The Guardian.
Mari Webel, “Putting Coronavirus in Context A History of Disease and Epidemics” (March 5, 2020) pop-up webinar from the National Humanities Center (skip to minute 10:00 to get to the actual conversation)
Orhan Pamuk, “What the Great Pandemic Novels Teach Us” (April 23, 2020) from The New York Times.
A Yi, "A Message Held to the Flame." Translated by Dylan Levi King. Paper Republic: Chinese Literature Matters (4/23/20).
“The History of Pandemics” series, Futuremakers Podcast, University of Oxford (11/20/20).
Other epidemics, other eras
Jim Downs, “Dying for Freedom” (2013) from The New York Times on emancipation, disease, and the Civil War
Anna Faherty for the Wellcome Collection, “The Outsiders: Six people, six illnesses, six different places and times. United by one story about how our response to infectious diseases – like syphilis, bubonic plague and cholera – is shaped by social forces.”
Gillian Frank and Lauren Gutterman, “A Church with AIDS” from sexinghistory.com
Jim Harris, “Top Ten Historical Flu Facts” from The Ohio State University’s “Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective” project
Jim Harris, “Rash Decisions: Anti-vaccination Movements in Historical Perspective” from The Ohio State University’s “Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective” project
Harvard University Open Collections Program, Contagion: Historical Views of Diseases and Epidemics website at http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/contagion.
"Love And HIV," Snap Judgment podcast (April 4, 2014) on the art of Daniel Goldstein.
Tom Mockaitis, “What we can learn from past pandemics” (March 11, 2020) from The Hill
Anne Sealey, “Influenza Pandemics Now, Then, and Again” from The Ohio State University’s “Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective” project
History Talks podcast, “HIV/AIDS—Past, Present, and Future” from The Ohio State University’s “Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective” project (hosts Eric Michael Rhodes and Lauren Henry speak with three experts — Thomas F. McDow, Kathy Lancaster, and Jesse Kwiek)
Lee, Haiyan. "Chinese Paw-litics, Anyone?" China Policy Institute Blog (July 7, 2016).
Varlık, Nükhet. “Rethinking the History of Plague in the Time of Coronavirus,” Alwaleed bin Talal Islamic Studies Program, Harvard University (April 30, 2020). Includes a link to an extensive bibliography.
The 1918 Influenza Pandemic
Catharine Arnold, History Extra Podcast interview on the Spanish Flu Pandemic
15 Minute History podcast, Episode 124: The ‘Spanish’ Influenza of 1918-20, The University of Texas at Austin.
John M. Barry, “How the Horrific 1918 Flu Spread Across America” (2017) from Smithsonian Magazine
Kenneth C. Davis, “Philadelphia Threw a WWI Parade That Gave Thousands of Onlookers the Flu” (2018) from Smithsonian Magazine
Meagan Flynn, “What happens if parades aren’t canceled during pandemics? Philadelphia found out in 1918, with disastrous results” (March 12, 2020) from The Washington Post
Jim Harris, “The 1918 Flu Pandemic” from The Ohio State University’s “Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective” project
Digital Encyclopedia on 1918 Flu and 1918 Influenza Escape Communities from University of Michigan
Rice, G.. Black November: The 1918 influenza pandemic in New Zealand, Canterbury University Press, 2005.
Rose, Christopher S. “The ‘Spanish’ Influenza in Egypt,” Alwaleed bin Talal Islamic Studies Program, Harvard University (May 6, 2020). (See also: blog post.)
Magill, John. “100 Years Ago, the Spanish Flu Pandemic Tore Through New Orleans in Three Terrifying Weeks” (March 27 2020) from First Draft: Stories from the Historic New Orleans Collection
Popular books
Markel, Howard. When Germs Travel: Six Major Epidemics That Have Invaded America and the Fears They Have Unleashed. Vintage, 2004.
Shah, Sonia. Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond. Macmillan, 2016.
Solnit, Rebecca. A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster. Random House, 2009.
Quammen, David. Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic. W.W. Norton & Company, 2012.
Films
(titles below linked to imdb descriptions and info on streaming availability)
Nosferatu (1922), F. W. Murnau
I Walked with a Zombie (1943), Jacques Tourneur
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) Don Siegel
The Seventh Seal (1957), Ingmar Bergman
The Andromeda Strain (1971), Robert Wise
The Cassandra Crossing (1976), George P. Cosmatos
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), Philip Kaufman
El año de la peste [The Plague Year] (1979). Directed by Felipe Cazals, screenplay by Gabriel García Márquez (based on Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, but set in contemporary Mexico City)
Nosferatu The Vampyre (German: Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht) (1979), Werner Herzog
An Early Frost (1985), John Erman
Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1986), Jeffrey Friedman and Rob Epstein
Longtime Companion (1989), Norman René
Delicatessen (1991), Marc Caro, Jean-Pierre Jeunet
And the Band Played On (1993), Roger Spottiswoode
Philadelphia (1993), Jonathan Demme
12 Monkeys (1995), Terry Gilliam
Outbreak (1995), Wolgang Petersen
The Hole (1998), Tsai Ming-liang
28 Days Later (2002), Danny Boyle
The Hours (2002), Stephen Daldry
Chicken Poets [Xiang jimao yiyang fei] (2002), Meng Jinghui
Yesterday (2004), Darrell Roodt
Children of Men (2006), Alfonso Cuarón
Rent (2006), Chris Columbus
The Host (2006), Bong Joon-Ho
The Witnesses (2007), André Téchiné
Blindness (2008), Fernando Meirelles
The Happening (2008), M. Night Shyamalan
Pontypool, (2008), Bruce McDonald
The Crazies (2010), Breck Eisner
Contagion (2011), Steven Soderbergh
Perfect Sense (2011), David Mackenzie
Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), Rupert Wyatt
We Were Here (2011), David Weissman
How to Survive a Plague (2012), David France
Love for Life 最爱 (2012). Gu Changwei.
World War Z (2013), Marc Forster
Dallas Buyers Club (2013), Jean-Marc Vallée
Pride (2014), Matthew Warchus
The Normal Heart (2014), Ryan Murphy
Train to Busan [Busanhaeng] (2016), Sang-ho Yeon
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016), Burr Steers
Grain [Buğday] (2017), Semih Kaplanoğlu
It Comes At Night (2017), Trey Edward Shults
Annihilation (2018), Alex Garland
BPM: Beats per Minute (2018), Robin Campillo
Dying to Survive 我不是药神 (2018). Wen Muye.
Blood Quantum (2019), Jeff Barnaby.
TV/Streaming Series
Survivors (1975-1977, 2008-2010), BBC
Angels in America (2003) HBO, adaptation of Tony Kushner’s play.
H+: The Digital Series (2012-2013) (link to youtube’s 40ish 5-minute-ish episodes; about 3 hours total)
The Last Ship (2014-2018) Michael Bay (TNT). Based loosely on William Brinkley’s 1988 book of the same name.
Cordon (2014) VTM
The Strain (2014) Guillermo del Toro (FX)
The Leftovers (2014-2017). HBO adaptation of Tom Perrotta’s book The Leftovers. Although the series does not deal with a pandemic, it focuses on the sudden disappearance of 2% of the world’s population. Themes of loss, faith, science permeate the series, and can be relevant to explore how we face a crisis like a pandemic.
Geoffrey Rice (7 May 2018). 1918 Influenza Presentation (Videotape). Wellington, New Zealand: Ministry of Health (New Zealand).
Chernobyl (2019), HBO
The Hot Zone (2019). Miniseries adaptation of the 1994 book of the same name. National Geographic.
Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak (2020). Netflix docuseries, link to 30-day free trial.
K-12 Resources
Anderson, Laurie Halse. Fever 1793. Simon and Schuster, 2011.
Anderson, M. T. The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party. Candlewick Press, 2006. Historical YA novel set in Boston during the Revolutionary War; winner U.S. National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. When the political unrest that would later spur the American Revolution begins to seep into the Gitney household, Gitney decides to move into the countryside outside of Boston, and then hold a Pox Party. Each attendee is infected with the pox, with the hope that under this controlled circumstance they will have only benign cases. Gitney also wants to both weaken and quarantine his slaves when he begins to hear talk of a slave revolt. Cassiopeia, however, is killed by the pox, and after her death is dissected by the scientists in the house. Octavian discovers what the scientists are doing and in his anger flees the house, and ends up in the Colonial Army. -wikipedia
Aspects of World War I: Spanish Flu. Middle school lesson with primary sources from the National Archives related to the Spanish Influenza epidemic that occurred near the end of World War I. “Students will gain an understanding of the wide scope of the outbreak and how medical personnel, authority figures, and everyday people dealt with the crisis. The hidden document within the activity, is a map depicting possible origins of the outbreak that should evoke curiosity for further inquiry.”
Lucier, Makiia. A Death-Struck Year. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014.
Teaching Keith Haring: HaringKids Lesson Plans [HIV/AIDS]
Wee, Sui-Lee and Vivian Wang, “China Grapples With Mystery Pneumonia-Like Illness” (January 6, 2020) The New York Times—seems to be the first Times coverage. Ask students to compare and contrast this article with a more recent one. -Emily Pressman
Relevant syllabi
Sari Altschuler, Abridged Syllabus for “Imagining Contagion in America”
Amy Boesky, Syllabus for “Literature, Contagion, Quarantine”
Tom Ewing, NEH Seminar, “The Spanish Influenza of 1918” (includes PDF reading packets)
Molly Farrell, Syllabus for “Outbreak Narratives”
Robb Haberman, Syllabus and Town Hall Meetings for “Yellow Jack and Black Vomit: Disease and the Making of Early America”
Alan Kraut, Syllabus for “From Smallpox to SARS: American Society's Response to Disease”
Ben Marwick, Syllabus for “Archaeology of Epidemics”
Bassam Sidiki, Syllabus for “On Immunity: Representing Infectious Disease”
Frank Snowden, Epidemics in Western Society Since 1600. Online course (recorded 2010).
Ann Laura Stoler and Patricia Williams, Syllabus for “Contagion: Law, Affect and Bioinsecurities”
Emily Waples, Syllabus for “Going Viral: Epidemics in American Literature, History, and Culture”
Bryan Waterman, two iterations of “Contagion” course:
- Syllabus for Contagion: Core Curriculum, Fall 2019
- Syllabus for Contagion: Pathways to Word Literature, Fall 2016
- Incredibly helpful twitter walk-through of Contagion syllabi: https://twitter.com/_waterman/status/1233506424770170881
Kym Weed, Syllabus for Narratives of Contagion//Contagious Narratives, graduate course.
Assignments
Aspects of World War I: Spanish Flu. Middle school lesson with primary sources from the National Archives related to the Spanish Influenza epidemic that occurred near the end of World War I. “Students will gain an understanding of the wide scope of the outbreak and how medical personnel, authority figures, and everyday people dealt with the crisis. The hidden document within the activity, is a map depicting possible origins of the outbreak that should evoke curiosity for further inquiry.”
Natalia Molina, A day in the life of a pandemic: COVID-19 assignment
Ivonne Wallace Fuentes, (History, Roanoke College) The Historian’s Toolbox: Lived Experience of COVID 19. An undergraduate history assignment where students create chronologies, an annotated bibliography of secondary sources, and primary source archives documenting their lived experience of the pandemic.
From Kathryn Denton for use with the Humanities Coronavirus Syllabus:
Resources
Arizona State Univ. A Journal of the Plague Year: An Archive of COVID19
Corona Times, a blog written and curated by engaged scholars from across the world, across multiple disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, with a strong grounding in humanities and social sciences, and in dialogue with public health knowledge. The blog is a public engagement project of HUMA, the Institute for Humanities in Africa at the University of Cape Town.
Crowdsourced #coronavirussyllabus (all disciplines), created by Alondra Nelson
- Twitter thread: #coronavirussyllabus
- Google doc: #coronavirussyllabus
Duke UP’s temporarily free books: “Navigating the Threat of Pandemic Syllabus”
Jaggers, A & Czerwiec, MK, ed. Covid-19 Comics, GraphicMedicine.org
Lewis, A. David, ed. Covid-19 Comics: Free and open repository of novel coronavirus comics resources. Caption Box, March 2020.
New York Times list of pandemic thrillers - Suggested by David Jones
Novels by women with disease-spreading plots - Suggested by Bryan Waterman
NPR playlist of “soothing music” - Suggested by David Jones
National Library of Medicine: Global Health Event Archive of COVID19
Public Books, list of University Presses with free content now available
Charles Louis Richter Twitter thread on response to 1900 outbreak of plague in Hawaii
Teaching COVID-19: An Anthropology Syllabus Project, edited by Nina Brown, Angela Jenks, Katie Nelson, and Laura Tilghman