Name: Covid-19: the importance of history in a global pandemic
Start: 2024-11-07T18:30:00+00:00
Location: International Anthony Burgess Foundation

Covid-19: the importance of history in a global pandemic

What is the role of a historian in a health crisis?
As Covid-19 became a full-blown pandemic in the spring of 2020, historians across the world produced rapid and imaginative responses, bringing historical perspectives to bear on how people and societies in the past responded to cholera, Spanish Flu, and more recently ebola. They paid much less attention to capturing and preserving the unfolding of Covid-19.
This talk draws on Stephanie Snow’s experience of leading a national oral history project on the UK’s National Health Service that metamorphosed into the creation of a national collection of Covid-19 testimonies in partnership with the British Library between 2020-2023.