Month: November 2025

For the eighth Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Fall 2025 series we are pleased to welcome Sheilagh Ogilvie (All Souls College, University of Oxford). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 20th November at the normal time (1600 CEST). More information about our speaker and the presentation is below. You can sign up for email notifications about the seminar series, including the Zoom details, here.

Blurb: How do societies use institutions – the humanly devised rules of social interaction – to tackle epidemic disease? Controlling Contagion (Princeton University Press, 2025) uses evidence from seven centuries of pandemics to show how societies tackled externalities – situations where my action creates costs or benefits for others in addition to those that I myself incur. It explores how markets, states, communities, religions, guilds, and families dealt with the negative externalities of contagion; the positive externalities of social distancing, sanitation, and immunisation; and the cross-border externalities of quarantine, vaccine diplomacy, and river agreements. It shows how, long before scientific medicine, human societies coordinated and innovated to deal with biological shocks.

Biography: Sheilagh Ogilvie is the Chichele Professor of Economic History at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the British Academy. She explores the lives of ordinary people in the past and tries to explain how poor economies get richer and improve human well-being. She is interested in how social institutions shaped economic development since the Middle Ages. She has recently launched a research project on “Serfdom and Economic Development, c. 1000-1861”.

For the seventh Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Fall 2025 series we are pleased to welcome Andrea Kifyasi (University of Dar es Salaam). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 13th November at the normal time (1600 CEST). More information about our speaker and the presentation is below. You can sign up for email notifications about the seminar series, including the Zoom details, here.

Blurb: The 1957-58 Asian flu was one of the global pandemics caused by the influenza ‘A’ virus, subtype H2N2. This flu pandemic claimed approximately one to four million lives, making it one of the deadliest pandemics in history. Generally, published research literature on Asian flu is scarce. A few studies document its history in Europe, the Americas, and Asia. Limited information exists regarding the history and socioeconomic consequences of the pandemic in Africa. This paper aims to fill this lacuna by exploring the history of the pandemic in colonial Tanganyika. It demonstrates that, although the virus primarily affected Asia, Europe, and North America, Africa was also impacted, indicating that the continent was equally vulnerable to global pandemics. Tanganyika, for instance, was among the first African colonial territories severely affected by the virus, experiencing its impact at an early stage. This paper critically examines the responses of the colonial government, the World Health Organization, and the community in their efforts to combat influenza, highlighting the urgency of the situation. Overall, the paper illuminates that the flu infected many individuals and sparked significant panic in both the colonial public health sector and the general community. However, compared to the 1918-19 Spanish flu, the Asian flu recorded lower morbidity and mortality rates due to its nature and the effective use of antibiotics and other non-biomedical measures. Focusing on Tanganyika, this paper employs a qualitative analytical method on relevant archival and published sources to uncover the history of the pandemic in colonial Africa.

Biography: Andrea Azizi Kifyasi is a senior lecturer at the Department of History, University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Kifyasi specialises in medical history and is interested in global health, China’s aid to Africa, medical diplomacy, and Cold War politics. He earned his PhD at the Department of History, University of Basel, Switzerland, in 2021, a Master of Arts in Chinese Studies at Zhejiang University, China, in 2016, a Master of Arts in History at the University of Dar es Salaam in 2015, and a bachelor degree in Arts with Education (Hons.) at the University of Dar es Salaam in 2011.

For the sixth Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Fall 2025 series we are pleased to welcome Christoph Gradmann (University of Oslo). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 6th November at the normal time (1600 CEST). More information about our speaker and the presentation is below. You can sign up for email notifications about the seminar series, including the Zoom details, here.

Blurb: Tuberculosis as a chronic infectious disease seems to sit oddly with common notions of what is to be considered epidemic or endemic. As a result, the conditions presence is often endemic in character, but the term itself is rarely employed. However, the question of an epidemic or endemic character was explicitly addressed was in studies of African tuberculosis between the world wars. Around 1930, researchers were exploring its presence in Africa, and many were favouring Lyle Cummins’ hypothesis that, much like European colonisation, the condition was a recent arrival in Africa. This meant that there had to be a quickly spreading epidemic into a susceptible population. In my paper, I will look at the epidemiological surveying that was done in Northern Tanganyika in exploration of Cummins’ theory. What does it teach us about colonial science? What happened to Cummins’ explanation when available data – as they were – supported it less and less?

Biography: Christoph Gradmann is professor of the history of medicine at the University of Oslo, Department of Community Medicine and Global Health. His research interests range from 19^th ct medical bacteriology, through 20^th ct drug development, antibiotics resistances to the history of tuberculosis Africa. He has published several monographs, numerous editions, guest editorships and many papers. He is the author of ‘Laboratory Disease: Robert Koch’s Medical Bacteriology, JHUP 2009’,  ‘Global Health and the New World Order’ (with Claire Beaudevin, Jean-Paul Gaudillière Anne Lovel and Laurent Pordie), Manchester University Press, 2020 and of ‘Another Magic Mountain: Kibong’oto Hospital and African Tuberculosis, 1920-2000.’ Ohio University Press, 2025.