Amidst the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic it seems that virtual conferences are here to stay. In the first half of this post, PhD student Ed DeVane reflects on the experience of ‘doing’ an online event. The second half of this blog serves as a report on the proceedings of the ‘Building Welfare States’ conference, hosted (online) by Warwick University, 23rd – 25th September 2020.
A series of ‘in conversation’ events exploring the many historical perspectives through which we can view, and better understand, the current coronavirus pandemic.
Writing History in a Drought Year.
“I want very much to write history that matters. But it should only matter for a little while:”
Editorial Fellow @menysnoweballes brings our #WritingRadically series to a close.
In commissioning this feature, editorial fellow Rachel Moss asked contributors: how can we radically re-imagine the writing of history? Over the next few weeks, our contributors reply with creative new methods, sources and forms that they are using to reshape what history writing can look like. In this instalment, Sarah Knott writes hastily, ahead of waking’s interruption, about being a historian who is always with child in one way or another.
The Black Report, a landmark critique of health inequalities that barely discussed ‘race’, turns forty today. Grace Redhead and Jesse Olszynko-Gryn investigate the legacy of the report for the age of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter.
The COVID-19 pandemic sheds light on the history of “facemask diplomacy”, in which contagion and epidemic become prisms through which power rivalries, tensions and aspirations are conducted – international politics wearing a facemask.
With Italy on the frontline of Europe’s Coronavirus outbreak, Rosa Salzberg examines how Renaissance Venice established world-leading measures to combat the plague, strategies we are still relying on today.
