Wednesday 9 December | 15:00 - 17:00 | Online
Series Overview
Pandemics and their attendant impact on the cultural and political fibre of societies have accompanied human civilisation since its earliest days. The Antoine Plague of 165 – 180 AD swept through the Roman empire claiming an estimated 5 million lives and may have spread into Han China around the same time. The Black Death of 1347 – 1351 claimed an estimated 30 – 50% (200 million) of Europe’s population and triggered huge cultural shifts and political unrest. The global HIV pandemic which began in the early 1980s is estimated to have killed between 25 and 35 million people and, absent a vaccine, continues to have a considerable impact on many countries.
Participants in this series will consider the following questions:
How have we understood ourselves in relation to these pandemics, not only as health emergencies, but as cultural and historical phenomena?
How have different pandemics challenged or solidified pre-existing social stratification and inequalities?
How have pre-existing or new discourses of sickness, disability, religion, and morality been mobilised during different pandemics and in the years that followed them?
To what extent have historical discourses on pandemics and infectious disease in general survived into our own time and to what effect?
In what ways do different societies ‘remember’ great pandemics?
2. American Horror Stories I: The Trump Administration’s Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic
The United States’ federal response to the COVID-19 pandemic has got commentators across the world wondering whether we are witnessing the breakdown of American Exceptionalism. In particular, this concerns the ways in which President Trump addresses his national and global audiences: through garbled communications which (inadvertently) lay bare the extreme violence at the heart of the American experience.
In this webinar, we will consider:
The origins, evolution, and current shape of the narratives which have solidified American national identity throughout the centuries;
The impact of the Trump Administration’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic on how the US is perceived within and outside its borders;
Narratives of crisis, trauma, and sickness in post-9/11 US, with a focus on the imaginary just emerging out of creative practitioners’ responses to the current pandemic;
The idea of ‘America’ as an omnipresent, global hegemon rather than an insular entity.
By the end of this webinar, participants will be familiar with a series of historical discourses on American exceptionalism. The framework provided will enable participants to understand current developments in US politics within a wider historical and cultural context and to consider what American Exceptionalism means today.
This webinar will be delivered by Dr Maria-Irina Popescu, who holds a PhD in Literature from the University of Essex. Her thesis examined the portrayal of domestic terrorists in contemporary American novels. In November 2017, she co-curated a major postgraduate conference of the British Association for American Studies (BAAS) entitled ‘We Hold These Truths to Be Self Evident: Post-Truth and American Myths.’