Category: News

For the sixth Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Spring 2025 series we are pleased to welcome Philip Slavin (University of Stirling). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 8 May 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.

Abstract

The late Michael Dols has produced much valuable research on the topic of plague outbreaks in Mamluk Middle East. Paradoxically – and with the exception of Stuart Borsch’s work on the Black Death in Egypt — the topic remains under-investigated, with many questions unanswered. The proposed paper will focus on the question: When and how was plague imported into Egypt and how did it spread over its territories, in the later Mamluk period. Did Egypt have its own plague reservoir, as claimed by some 18^th– and 19^th-century writers, both Western and Egyptian? Or was it imported from elsewhere? If so, from where and by what means? And how would plague spread within Egypt, once imported on ships or on camelback? To answer this questions, the paper will rely on a wide array of sources – first and foremost, Mamluk chronicles, but also other, hitherto unutilised materials, including pilgrims’ travelogs, and correspondence of Italian merchants, , notaries, travellers and diplomats (often overlapping categories). Taken together, these sources connect together pieces of puzzle, thus revealing some fascinating insights into the questions above. Although dealing with a later period compared to other conference papers, its methodology, findings and conclusions may appear instructive to scholars and scientists of earlier plague/ infectious diseases in Egypt, for which much less source material survives.

About the Speaker

Philip Slavin received a BA and MA from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a PhD from the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. He was a postdoctoral researcher at Yale and McGill, and taught at Kent before becoming Professor of History at Stirling. He is a historian working on the global history of infectious diseases and environmental disasters. He is currently engaged in several inter-disciplinary projects dealing with ‘big questions’ of the history of evolution and ecology of plague, on a global scale and in a longue durée perspective, in collaboration with aDNA scientists and palaeo-climatologists. He has published two books and 55 articles on various topics of economic, environmental history and history of diseases.  

For the fifth Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Spring 2025 series we are pleased to welcome Emily Mendenhall (Georgetown University). Note that the seminar will be held on Thursday, 24 April, one hour earlier than usual at 1500 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.

Abstract

Long Covid is an old story linked to a new virus. Chronic Lyme. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Chronic Pain. These contested conditions are interpreted with trepidation—in many cases throughout history they have been considered unreal or imagined among medical professional: a cry for help from a hysterical woman. Though, their prominence is patterned throughout history and takes center stage in famous literature, social science, and medical humanities. Because women are centered as those most afflicted by these conditions, they have become largely feminized and dismissed, regardless of who they are. Yet, the long history of symptoms that are defined as “unexplained” or “complex” or “contested” tell us more about medicine than they do about people. These symptoms may be physical—such as pain in the back, extremities, or the base of the neck. They may be psychological—such as dissociation, brain fog, or lack of focus. They may be emotional—such as deep sadness or anxiety. It is important to listen to these complex bundles of symptoms and try to decipher them: not only through the arc of someone’s life but also a cultural history through which they have emerged, shifted, and transformed. In this talk, I track this history, beginning with hysteria, and leading us to the present-day.

About the Speaker

Emily Mendenhall is a medical anthropologist, Guggenheim Fellow, and Professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Mendenhall has published widely at the boundaries of anthropology, psychology, medicine, and public health. This work focuses on social and biological links between social trauma and diabetes, the theory and experience of syndemics, how and why people use idioms of distress, mental health and well-being, complex chronic illness, and the politics of pandemics. Her monographs include Syndemic Suffering: Social Distress, Depression, and Diabetes among Mexican Immigrant Women (2012), Rethinking Diabetes: Entanglements with Trauma, Poverty, and HIV (2019), and Unmasked: COVID, Community, and the Case of Okoboji (2022). Her new book, Invisible Illness: A History, from Hysteria to Long Covid, will be published in 2025.

For the fourth Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Spring 2025 series we are pleased to welcome Marília Nepomuceno (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 3 April at the normal time (1600 CEST). For our attendees outside of Europe, please note that Central European Summer Time has begun, you can check the seminar time in your time zone here. 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.

We also note that the seminar previously scheduled for 22 May with Katarina Luise Matthes (Universität Zürich) has been postponed until Fall 2025.

Abstract

This talk explores the COVID-19 pandemic in the Global South, and highlights why context matters in understanding pandemics. I will discuss two key aspects: (1) the demographic challenges that low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) face in responding to pandemics and epidemics, with a focus on older populations, and (2) how the COVID-19 pandemic reshaped overall levels of mortality and the age structure of causes of death in an LMIC. This presentation invites you to rethink pandemic preparedness and impact beyond the high-income framework.

About the Speaker

Marília Nepomuceno is a research scientist and PhD training chair at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. Her research focuses on advancing demographic methods, and mortality and health in later life, addressing multiple dimensions of demographic analysis, including age, gender, education, and spatial dimensions. Marília’s research also includes data quality in low- and middle-income countries, the centenarian population, lifespan inequalities, mortality shocks, and seasonal mortality.

For the third Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Spring 2025 series we are pleased to welcome Jessica Stockdale (Simon Fraser University). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 20 March at the normal time (1600 CET). 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.

Abstract

Genomic epidemiology has become a critical part of the infectious disease toolbox, that sheds light on the effects of pathogen evolution on transmission. While genomic tools are now routinely used to track the emergence of novel pathogens and strains, their use in forecasting and efforts to model drivers of local transmission is still developing. In this talk, I will present a statistical modelling framework that forecasts the size of an upcoming COVID-19 wave, such as that driven by a new variant. This framework combines diverse global data, including COVID-19 genomic sequences and epidemiological, clinical and demographic features. We are able to assess which predictors were more or less influential on wave size, and how this varied during the pandemic. Focusing on the Omicron BA.1 and BA.2 waves, we found that local genomic landscapes and demographic features were impactful on wave sizes around the world, and the importance of predictors changed markedly between waves, reflecting ongoing changes in underlying epidemiology and our public health response.

About the Speaker

Dr. Jessica Stockdale is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics at Simon Fraser University and a member of the Pacific Institute on Pathogens, Pandemics and Society. Her research uses approaches in mathematical and statistical modelling to address challenges in public health, with a focus on infectious disease. Currently, her work spans the development of methods in genomic epidemiology to predict patterns of disease transmission, to applied healthcare modelling supporting response to homelessness and housing insecurity.