A Special Journal Issue on Pandemics with Neeraja Sankaran and Stephen Weldon

Neeraja Sankaran (National Centre for Biological Sciences-TIFR) and Stephen Weldon (University of Oklahoma) join the Infectious Historians to discuss a recent special journal issue they edited. The issue includes many studies about histories of disease, pandemics and their impact around the world and across time, and reflections on how people have studies these events in the past. Neeraja and Stephen begin by telling the story of how they decided to put out the special issue, and reflect on some of their early choices and how those determined the shape of the final outcome. They discuss the question of how to measure the impact of this issue, and share how the editing work has influenced their own thinking on these issues. The conversation then moves on to discuss teaching courses on pandemics, before wrapping up with another reflection, this time on the impacts of Covid on how people write about disease.