Teaching Plagues and Pandemics with Janet Kay
Episode 45 - January 24, 2021
Janet Kay (Princeton University) talks to Merle and Lee for a special episode about preparing to teach her “Art & Archaeology of Plague” during the upcoming Spring 2021 semester. She discusses her planning for the broad chronological range of her course that runs from the Plague of Athens (c. 430 BCE) to Covid-19, while introducing Plague Simulations, an innovative set of assignments, and several guest lectures by colleagues. Janet then talks about why she thought this was a perfect time to offer a course like this and how she hopes it will help students think about disease and pandemics of the past while reflecting on our world today. At the end, she promises to come back at the end of the semester and talk about how the course went.
Further Reading
- Sharon De Witte, “Archaeological Evidence of Epidemics Can Inform Future Epidemics,” Annual Review of Anthropology 45 (2016), 63–77.
- Hugh Wilmott et al., “A Black Death mass grave at Thornton Abbey: the discovery and examination of a fourteenth-century rural catastrophe,” Antiquity 93/373 (2020), 179–196.
- Lori Jones and Richard Nevell, “Plagued by doubt and viral misinformation: the need for evidence-based use of historical disease images,” The Lancet Infectious Diseases 16 (2016), e235–40.
- R. L. Gowland and A. G. Western, “Morbidity in the Marshes: Using Spatial Epidemiology to Investigate Skeletal Evidence for Malaria in Anglo-Saxon England (AD 410–1050), American Journal of Physical Anthropology 147 (2012), 301–311.
- Frank Snowden, Epidemics and Society (New Haven, 2019).
Our Guest
Janet Kay,
Lecturer, Department of Art & Archaeology, Princeton University
