Category: Pandemics & Society Seminars

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.

For the fifth Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Fall 2025 series we are pleased to welcome Florian Bonnet (INED). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 30th October 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: Why were some regions hit much harder by COVID-19 than others—and how new was this geography of mortality? In this talk, I will examine regional excess mortality during the pandemic in 2020 and 2021 across more than 500 regions in France and Europe, highlighting which areas were most affected and how spatial patterns evolved over time. I will then compare these recent patterns with four major mortality crises of the 20th and 21st centuries: the Spanish flu, the 1911 and 2003 heatwaves, and the Hong Kong flu. Using harmonized regional mortality data from the French Human Mortality Database, I will explore how the magnitude and spatial structure of excess mortality during COVID-19 fit within a longer historical continuum of longevity shocks.

Biography: Florian Bonnet is a tenured researcher at the French Institute for Demographic Studies (Ined). His work lies at the intersection of demography, economics, history, and geography, with a focus on the long-term evolution of social and spatial inequalities in longevity and economic development in France and across Europe. He combines historical data reconstruction with spatial and statistical analysis to uncover how regional disparities in mortality and living standards have emerged, persisted, and transformed over time. All his works can be found there: https://sites.google.com/view/florianbonnet/recherche?authuser=0

The talk by Andrea Kifyasi (University of Dar es Salaam) titled “From China to Africa: A History of the 1957 Asian Influenza Pandemic in Colonial Tanganyika” originally scheduled on the 23th of October is moved to 13th November.

The next Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Fall 2025 series will take place 30th October: Florian Bonnet (INED), Contextualizing the Global Burden of COVID-19 Pandemic: A Historical and Geographical Exploration of Excess Mortality in France, 1901–2021.

Information on rest of our Fall 2025 webinar series including how to sign up for our mailing list is found here: Fall 2025 seminar series – Centre for Research on Pandemics & Society (PANSOC)

For the fourth Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Fall 2025 series we are pleased to welcome Hampton Gaddy (London School of Economics & University of Oxford). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 9th October 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: A large body of social science and health research uses measures of the 1918 influenza pandemic’s mortality to estimate what the biosocial effects of the pandemic were. However, many of the pandemic measures used in this research either exhibit very high rates of error; are systematically correlated with pre-pandemics determinants of the effect of interest; or are a poorly chosen estimand for testing the causal chain of interest. Additionally, even though pandemics have wide-ranging impacts on society, many existing studies do not attempt to rule out plausible alternate channels linking the pandemic to the effect of interest. Each of these four methodological problems can produce false negative results, false positive results, and false positive results of the incorrect sign. We illustrate the extent of these problems using a series of helpful case studies from the 1918 context. In doing so, we make methodological contributions that stress the importance for causal research on pandemic of conducting sensitivity analyses on the calculation of excess mortality, accounting for omitted variable and collider bias, and measuring pandemic severity for the most theoretically appropriate time period and point-of-view.

Biography: Hampton Gaddy is a PhD researcher in demography and economic history at the London School of Economics and an affiliate at the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science at the University of Oxford. He works primarily on the 1918 influenza pandemic, the determinants of its mortality, and its social consequences.

For the second Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Fall 2025 series we are pleased to welcome Max Marczinek (University of Oxford). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 25 September 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: In this webinar, Marczinek will present a paper studying the relationship between labour scarcity and productivity in the context of a 1710s plague outbreak. While higher wages should have led to an export contraction, exports grew after plagued regions shifted into capital-intensive production. Using a Ricardian model, he show that productivity growth in capital-intensive sectors is best suited to explain this export boom. Marczinek argue that labour scarcity incentivises capital-intensive production which raises productivity growth.

Biography: Max Marczinek is a 4th year PhD student in Economics at Oxford University. His research studies trade, labour, and economic history. He combine trade models with novel and often historical data sources, using theory to extract new insights from granular data.

For the first Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Fall 2025 series we are pleased to welcome Robert Braid (University of Montpellier). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 18 September 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: This paper integrates the findings of psychology and behavioral economics in order to understand better an historical phenomenon. After the Black Death, a plague epidemic which wiped out roughly 40% of the population, the historical data runs counter to all economic theory that would predict an increase in productivity and higher real wages. Peasants inherited the most fertile lands and had larger farms, yet grain yields fell. Capital (tools, windmills, livestock, carts, etc.) per capita increased tremendously but productivity fell. Commercial infrastructure and public administration remained intact, but trade dropped off. There was an acute shortage of labour yet real wages stagnated. Although climate factors may account for some of these trends, they don’t explain all, leaving economic historians of this period perplexed. This study argues that the Black Death caused trauma in survivors, altering levels of biochemicals leading to increased agitation and lack of attention in some and disengagement in others, similar to the behavior of victims of PTSD. Chroniclers and other observers recorded a number of behavior patterns among survivors which suggest that the Black Death was a deeply traumatic event which affected their ability to work. These findings are also consistent with the historical data on productivity and may also shed light on the increased levels of civil unrest in the post-plague era.

Biography: Robert Braid is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Montpellier (France), and member of the Center for Environmental Research – Montpellier. He focuses on the origins of economic regulations across different western European regions, in particular in the 13th and 14th centuries. Most of his work has been dedicated to understanding the psychological, social and economic impact of the Black Death which gave rise to a broad wave of unprecedented economic regulations seeking to constrain the demands of workers and retailers. He has also worked on the medieval scholastic literature that attempts to give a moral framework both for economic agents and for rulers who seek to regulate their behavior, and how this literature changed soon after the plague. He has also worked on wage theory and the history of economic thought in general. 

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.