Description:
This edited collection features fourteen newly commissioned articles, each of which responds to the theme of plague from different disciplinary perspectives. Contributors focus on the effects of COVID-19 on everyday life, drawing also on insights from different historical experiences of plague as a way of exploring human responses to epidemics, past and present.
Each chapter opens with a different illustration that serves as a source for subsequent discussion, enabling readers to make connections between everyday objects, experiences, and broader critical debates about plague and its impact on humanity. Thought-provoking commentaries stem from a variety of humanities disciplines including archaeology, electronic literature, history, linguistics, media and cultural studies, and musicology.
Encountering the Plague explores ways in which humanities research can play a meaningful role in key social and political debates, and provides compelling examples of how the past can inform our understanding of the present.
Brief description: Tony Whyton is professor of jazz studies at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire at Birmingham City University, UK.
Review Quotes:
'This wide-ranging, timely and unique collection registers in a powerful way the diversity as well as the commonalities of the experience of plagues and pandemics. It makes clear that art and creativity can provide some of the deepest insights into such experiences, and any analysis that ignores this will be impoverished and misleading... We need the humanities - and this volume (inspired by the work of the Humanities in the European Research Area consortium) eloquently testifies to the truth of this.'