The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates that the history of epidemic and contagious diseases is far from over. It has revealed deep-seated, structural inequalities in health as well. Still, we know surprisingly little about the historical roots of these contemporary inequalities in health, and if the impact of epidemics and contagious disease changed over time due to societal changes. Furthermore, it is unclear what the social, economic, environmental or epidemiological drivers are for divergences in mortality resulting from epidemics and contagious diseases over time and place.
Workshops will be organized on specific historical epidemics and contagious diseases (such as tuberculosis, influenza, smallpox, plague, malaria) and methodological issues. The scholars invited will be drawn from a great variety of disciplines because research on the historical legacy of epidemics and contagious diseases has tended to be far too fragmented by disciplinary boundaries.
The IUSSP Panel at the European Society for Historical Demography Conference
Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands, 30 august-2 september 2023
Hybrid Workshop: "From influenza to COVID-19"
Madrid, Spain and Online, 2024
Hybrid Workshop: "Tuberculosis. The White Death as a Social Disease"
University of Sassari, Italy, September 2024
Online Meetings: "New ways of transcribing, visualizing, publishing, and providing access to data on epidemics and contagious diseases"
3 times a year starting October 2023, and leading up to a workshop at the University of Zurich, Switzerland in 2025.
Session on ‘Epidemics and Contagious Diseases: The Legacy of the Past’ at the 2025 International Population Conference (IPC2025), Brisbane, Australia.