Month: April 2026

For the eleventh Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Spring 2026 series we are pleased to welcome Sakari Saaritsa & Jarmo Peltola (University of Helsinki). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 23 April at the normal time (16:00 CEST). More information about our speakers and the presentation is below. You can sign up for email notifications about the seminar series, including the Zoom details, here.

About the talk:

Research on the long-run effects of shocks and crises on the health, socioeconomic outcomes and human capital of individuals has developed rapidly in historical demography and economic and social history in recent decades. A fine-grained research corpus has elaborated the negative impact of different kinds of shocks based on the type of event, the life stage of the affected individuals, and the outcomes looked at. While so-called technophysio evolution theory traditionally emphasized the role of nutrition and economic factors in damaging human capital, recent empirical evidence from historical demography suggests that health shocks exert the most significant influence on long-term outcomes. Even when the primary shock is non-epidemiological (e.g., a crisis in livelihoods, war or incarceration), health is typically the primary dimension in which such scars are formed and perpetuated throughout the life course. Such findings could carry high policy relevance.

A classic issue with correctly measuring such effects is the interplay of scarring (long-run damage) and selection (the immediate elimination of more frail individuals from the data by the crisis biasing results upwards). In real-world contexts, causal factors typically cumulate and overlap, and so do their impacts along several dimensions. The interaction of different factors, including different types of crises, gender and inequalities in socioeconomic status (SES), has been identified as a research area where more work is needed. In our ongoing Academy project A Scarred People, building on individual level data construction from historical urban settings in 20^th century Tampere and Helsinki, we are focusing particularly on the impact and interaction of three shocks: the 1916 typhoid epidemic; the 1918 Civil War; and the employment crisis of the Great Depression of the 1930s. We are able to look at the heterogeneity in impact of each of these by conditioning on SES (occupation, residence), sex, and age at occurrence. On the outcome side, in addition to end point variables like death, we can look at entire trajectories and life courses over time.

In this talk, we will provide empirical examples of the challenges of identifying the longevity effects of two factors, being exposed to a Typhoid epidemic in 1916 and being a member of the Red Guard in 1918 during the Civil War.

About the speakers:

Sakari Saaritsa is a Professor of Social History at the University of Helsinki. His research interests include the quantitative history of human development (particularly health, education and physiological capital), social inequality, historical indicators of well-being, and relationships between economic and human development over time. He is working with several historical datasets on Finland with local population and individual level data on demographics, anthropometrics, health and education, and involved in efforts to build national historical data infrastructure with Nordic partners. His research has been published in journals including the European Review of Economic History, Social Science History, The History of the Family and Cliometrica.

Jarmo Peltola is docent in Economic and Social History at the University of Helsinki with deep expertise in the economic, social and demographic history of crises, particularly the Great Depression, urban history, particularly of the city of Tampere, and in the development of pioneering economic, social and demographic individual level data unparalleled in Finland. Peltola has published major monographic works and international research articles on e.g., the total history of the Great Depression in Tampere, the demographic and economic history of the city and the development of health and welfare both locally and nationally.

For the tenth Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Spring 2026 series we are pleased to welcome Michał B. Paradowski (University of Warzaw). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 16 April at the normal time (16:00 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.

About the talk:

This talk examines how teachers and learners around the world coped when the COVID-19 pandemic forced education online almost overnight. Drawing on survey responses from over 8,000 teachers and students across 118 countries, the study offers one of the most geographically wide-ranging pictures of the emergency shift to remote teaching to date.

The study investigates a wide range of factors that shaped how teachers and students experienced the crisis. These include the level and type of institution teachers worked in, how classes were delivered, and whether the economic context of the country made a difference. The research also looks at the emotional and psychological dimensions of the experience – what drove stress and burnout among educators, and how teachers’ perceptions of their students’ wellbeing fed back into their own. A particular focus is placed on what the shift to online teaching meant for actual learning progress, and whether some groups of learners were more affected than others. On the student side, the talk will explore what distinguished those who coped relatively well from those who found the transition more difficult, and what all of this might mean for the future of online teaching.

Beyond the immediate teaching context, the study examines how the way people navigated the disruption was influenced by individual characteristics, such as having a more outgoing personality or speaking multiple languages. Implications will also be made for the optimal way to operationalise multilingualism.

About the speaker:

Michał B. Paradowski is a professor and teacher trainer at the Institute of Applied Linguistics, University of Warsaw, and a research and language teaching consultant. His work spans second language acquisition, bi- and multilingualism, psycholinguistics, and educational psychology, with a growing focus on how learning is shaped by social and situational factors, including in times of disruption. He has published over 80 scientific works and delivered more than 260 invited lectures, seminars and workshops worldwide.

You may also be interested in another upcoming talk by Michał B. Paradowski at the University of Oslo, as part of the Language and Cognition Forum series, on Friday 17 April at 12:15: Your network is your net worth: How social ties drive second language learning from sojourners to settlers. Place: Henrik Wergelands Hus, Meeting Room 421.

For the ninth Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Spring 2026 series we are pleased to welcome Raj Kumar Subedi (Georgia State University). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 9 April at the normal time (16:00 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.

About the talk:

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted deep-rooted health inequities globally, with marginalized populations showing disproportionate disease burden. We employed Serfling regression models and multivariable analyses to estimate excess mortality across geographic, demographic, and poverty groups from 2020 to 2022 in Chile. Elderly populations (80+ years) experienced the highest excess mortality (267.35 per 10 000 population), more than 8 times higher than those under 80 years (30.80 per 10 000 population). Multivariable linear regression models showed both Indigenous proportion (coefficient = 53.66, P < .001) and elderly population proportion (coefficient = 5.68, P < .01) as the strong predictors of comuna level excess mortality. Poverty correlated significantly with excess mortality (r = 0.23, P < .001) but this association weakened after adjustment for other covariates in multivariable models. Excess mortality peaked in 2021 rather than in 2020 for most groups, with males initially experiencing higher rates during early pandemic waves. Spatial analyses revealed statistically significant clustering (Moran’s I = 0.119, P < .001) with identifiable hotspots in northern Chile and parts of the south. These findings indicated persistent mortality disparities by age and Indigenous status, independent of poverty, and highlight the urgent need for equity-focused pandemic preparedness. An effective pandemic response should integrate biomedical measures, such as vaccination, with culturally grounded strategies that address structural barriers and the broader social determinants of health.

You can read full paper here: Poverty and ethnic patterns in COVID-19 excess mortality: evidence from Chile, 2020-2022 | American Journal of Epidemiology | Oxford Academic

About the speaker:

Raj Subedi is Graduate Research Assistant at School of Public Health, Georgia State University, USA. He has a Master’s degree in Public Health from BP Koirala Institute of Health Sciences and a background in public health research and has previously worked at various organizations, including the Nepal Public Health Foundation and St. Jude’s Recovery Center.