Category: News

For the ninth and final Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Fall 2025 series we are pleased to welcome Mallika Snyder (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 11th December 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: Millions of people have lost a relative to COVID-19, with many of these individuals likely to be alive well into this century. How might this population influence how the COVID-19 pandemic is remembered, and how may this shape policy and popular responses to future crises? This talk presents ongoing research using demographic microsimulation to predict the extent and trajectory of what we term “kinship memory” – the share of a population bereaved by a mortality crisis – in the context of COVID-19 in 120 countries around the world from 2025 to 2100. Our findings show that the continued survival of a large proportion of grandchildren will contribute to greater stability of kinship memory, with around 1 percent of the 2100 population of most regions related to a victim. However, the extent of this stability is limited by the relatively older age structure of COVID-19 excess mortality, which shapes the predicted ages of bereaved kin and the extent of their projected survival. Our work highlights the role of demographic structure of both the group of bereaved relatives and the overall population in shaping the projected kinship memory of a crisis.

Bio: Mallika Snyder is a Research Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in the Department of Digital and Computational Demography. Her research focuses on measuring the demographic impact of crisis-related population change in limited-data settings, and better understanding its implications for affected populations and individuals. Drawing on computational demographic methods and non-traditional data sources, her recent work has explored topics including the effects of COVID-19 excess mortality on kinship networks, as well as the development of innovative methods to better integrate information on crisis-related mobility into subnational population projections used to inform United Nations humanitarian action. A graduate of the UC Berkeley PhD program in Demography and the MA in Statistics, she recently joined MPIDR from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), where she worked as an applied demographer focused on population data and estimation in humanitarian settings.

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.