Guest Podcast: Fundamental Concepts in Understanding Pandemic Diseases

The series offers discussions with the editors and authors of a special issue of the Isis Current Bibliography. It provides perspectives into the state of current scholarship on the history of pandemics, and where the field might be heading in the future.

For more information and to access the special issue, see https://pandemics.isiscb.org/

This episode of the series features contributors who wrote and reviewed bibliographic essays surveying the literature about concepts fundamental to our understanding of pandemic and epidemic diseases, such as the broad disciplinary categories of epidemiology, as well as the concepts of vaccinations and syndemics. Offering their perspectives on the significance of these topics are: Lukas Engelmann, Jacob Steere-Williams and Dora Vargha. They discuss how historians can move away from a model of biography of disease and towards a better understanding of the co-occurrence of disease epidemics with epidemics of social phenomena.