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A daily discussion of the COVID-19 pandemic with a diverse collection of disaster experts - hosted by Dr. Scott Gabriel Knowles, a historian of disasters at KAIST in Daejeon, South Korea.
Episodes
Thursday Mar 31, 2022
Thursday Mar 31, 2022
My name is Scott Gabriel Knowles, I am a historian of disasters and since March 16, 2020 the host of COVIDCalls, a daily discussion of the pandemic with a diverse collection of disaster experts. Today I will be reading some memorials from victims of COVID.
Thursday Mar 31, 2022
Thursday Mar 31, 2022
My name is Jacob Steere-Williams, I am a Historian of Epidemic Disease and Public Health at the College of Charleston. I’m so glad to be hosting a series of episodes for this special program. You can catch most of them with the regular host and founder of COVID-Calls, Scott Knowles.
Today I want to do a deep dive into COVID metaphors- COVID history, COVID research networks, and COVID emotions- a big topic with some amazing guests.
My guests today- make this episode particularly special, as they are both brilliant historians and also friends.
Dr. Agnes Arnold-Forster is a historian of medicine, healthcare, work, and emotions at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Her first book, The Cancer Problem, was published by Oxford University Press in 2021, and is current sitting on my desk. Agnes is current a co-PI on the project Healthy Scepticism, a Wellcome Trust and King’s College funded multidisciplinary project about healthcare dissenters and anti-establishment voices. For several years before this she was part of the Surgery and Emotion project- a second monograph Cold, Hard Steel: The Surgical Stereotype Past & Present comes out this year with Manchester University Press.
Dr. Nathan Crowe is an Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. He is an expert on the history of twentieth century biology, biotechnology, biomedicine and Anglo-American scientific culture. His book- also on my desk, Forgotten Clones: the Birth of Cloning and the Biological Revolution, charts the emergence of cloning techniques in cancer research after WWII, and the complicated matrix of cloning science and cloning publics into the 1960s. Nathan is currently working a several projects related to understanding biotechnology.
Wednesday Mar 30, 2022
Wednesday Mar 30, 2022
Wednesday Mar 30, 2022
Tuesday Mar 29, 2022
Tuesday Mar 29, 2022
My name is Scott Gabriel Knowles, I am a historian of disasters and since March 16, 2020 the host of COVIDCalls, a daily discussion of the pandemic with a diverse collection of disaster experts. Today I will be reading some memorials from victims of COVID.
Tuesday Mar 29, 2022
Tuesday Mar 29, 2022
Today I talk with the core COVIDCalls team!
Eleanor Mayes is completing a Master of Design at the University of California, Berkeley. She is interested in accessibility, sustainability, and fostering equity within design and engineering. She manages the transcription of COVIDCalls, and assists with the roll-out of the COVIDCalls archive and website.
Shivani Patel is a 3rd year undergraduate student at Drexel University studying Finance and Economics with a minor in Philadelphia. For the past two years, she has been working at COVID-Calls as a production assistant helping with scheduling guests and keeping the calendar organized.
Bucky Stanton is a PhD Candidate in the department of Science & Technology Studies (STS) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His dissertation Arkadian Pasts and Futures investigates natural and cultural resource extraction in the central Peloponnese, exploring the history and politics of archaeology, energy and modernity in Greece
Monday Mar 28, 2022
Monday Mar 28, 2022
My name is Jacob Steere-Williams, I am a Historian of Epidemic Disease and Public Health at the College of Charleston. I’ll be guest hosting a series of episodes for this special program, but you can catch most of them with the regular host and founder of COVID-Calls, Scott Knowles.
My guests today:
Nadja Durbach is Professor of History at the University of Utah. She received her PhD from the Johns Hopkins University and is the author of three books on the history of the body in Modern Britain: Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England, 1853-1907 (2005), Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows and Modern British Culture (2010) and Many Mouths: The Politics of Food in Britain from the Workhouse to the Welfare State (2020).
Claas Kirchhelle is Assistant Professor of History (Wellcome Trust University Award) at University College Dublin. His research focuses on the history of microbes, infectious disease control, and the development and regulation of antibiotics and vaccines. He has authored three books on the history of antibiotics in food production (Pyrrhic Progress, 2020 (Rutgers)), animal welfare science and activism (Bearing Witness, 2021 (Palgrave)), and typhoid control (Typhoid, 2022 (Scala)). He is also co-curator of two multi award-winning exhibitions on the history of penicillin (Back from the Dead) and typhoid (Typhoidland).
Daniel Goldberg, is an Associate Professor at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus. Trained as an attorney, a historian of medicine, and an ethicist, his work is wide-ranging on issues of public health law and ethics, population-level bioethics, the social determinants of health, chronic disease, and pain. Dr. Goldberg has published in virtually every important venue, including the American Journal of Bioethics and the New England Journal of Medicine, and he’s been extraordinarily active the past two years in op-eds and interviews about the ongoing pandemic.
Monday Mar 28, 2022
Monday Mar 28, 2022
My name is Jacob Steere-Williams, I am a Historian of Epidemic Disease and Public Health at the College of Charleston. I’ll be guest hosting a series of episodes for this special program, but you can catch most of them with the regular host and founder of COVID-Calls, Scott Knowles.
This is Part 2 of a two-part episode exploring the entanglement of the COVID-19 pandemic and the War in Ukraine. Last hour I spoke with Ukrainian health expert Pavlo Kovtoniuk and historian Dora Vargha. On February 24th, 2022, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba tweeted that Putin had “launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.” Russian attacks began that Thursday after Russian President Vladimir Putin approved in a televised address “a special military operation” in Ukraine. Russian missiles began to attack cities and civilians all across Ukraine. Three weeks later the war in Ukraine rages on. 2 to 3 million Ukrainians have fled the country, and millions more displaced internally within the country, creating a tremendous humanitarian crisis, and what is undoubtedly the largest European military conflict since WWII. Casualty statistics have been difficult to come by- the UN reported yesterday more than 500 civilian Ukrainian deaths, and US military estimates are between 2,000 and 4,000 deaths in the Ukrainian armed forces, and 5,000 to 6,000 deaths of Russian soldiers.
Dr. Trish Starks is a historian of Russian and former Soviet medicine and public health, and a professor of history at the University of Arkansas. She has written extensively on Soviet hygienic reforms in the 1920s in her 2008 book The Body Soviet: Hygiene Propaganda, and the Revolutionary State, smoking in the Soviet Union in the 2018 book Smoking Under the Tsars, and her newly published book Cigarettes and Soviets: Tobacco in the USSR. She is currently working on gendered anxieties of the body and vigor in Russian contexts.
My second guest, Dr. Paula Michaels, is an Associate Professor of History at Monash University. She is an expert on the history of medicine and gender Russia, Eastern Europe, and Eurasia. Dr. Michaels is a leading expert in the field of trauma studies, publishing numerous articles about childbirth, and maternity care and trauma in Eastern European history. Her 2014 book, Lamaze: An International History, was the winner of the 2015 Frances Richardson Keller-Sierra Prize from the Western Association of Women Historians. In 2021 she published Gender and Trauma Since 1900 with Christina Twomey, and is currently working on a book project, Soviet Medical Internationalism and the Global Cold War
Monday Mar 28, 2022
Monday Mar 28, 2022
This is Part 1 of a two-part episode exploring the entanglement of the COVID-19 pandemic and the War in Ukraine. On February 24th, 2022, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba tweeted that Putin had “launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.” Russian attacks began that Thursday after Russian President Vladimir Putin approved in a televised address “a special military operation” in Ukraine. Russian missiles began to attack cities and civilians all across Ukraine. Three weeks later the war in Ukraine rages on. 2 to 3 million Ukrainians have fled the country, and millions more displaced internally within the country, creating a tremendous humanitarian crisis, and what is undoubtedly the largest European military conflict since WWII. Casualty statistics have been difficult to come by- the UN reported yesterday more than 500 civilian Ukrainian deaths, and US military estimates are between 2,000 and 4,000 deaths in the Ukrainian armed forces, and 5,000 to 6,000 deaths of Russian soldiers.
My guests today are experts here to help us make sense of the War and the Pandemic
Pavlo Kovtoniuk (Kov-to-Nyuk) is a co-founder of the Ukrainian Healthcare Center - UHC, a think tank located in Kyiv, Ukraine. His background is in health financing and management. In 2016-2019 he served as a vice-minister of health of Ukraine and led a large-scale health system reform in the country. In 2019-2020 he was a consultant at the WHO office for health systems strengthening in Barcelona. During the COVID-19 Pavlo’s team at the UHC monitored the pandemic in Ukraine and supported the government in pandemic response.
Dora Vargha is Professor of History and Medical Humanities based jointly at Humboldt University in Berlin and the University of Exeter. She is currently leading two research projects on the history of socialism and global health. Previously, she had been co-editor of the journal Social History of Medicine and has worked as an expert for WHO Western Pacific on informing epidemic preparedness with historical perspectives.