Zoonotic Transformations of a Pandemic Disease
Between the 1890s and the 1950s, bubonic plague became the first disease in human history to lead to a global pandemic that was scientifically understood as resulting from animal-to-human infection (zoonosis). At the centre of this paradigm shift in approaching epidemics stood the rat, an animal whose relation to plague only emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. In this inaugural lecture, Professor Christos Lynteris argues that rather than being a case of scientific discovery, rats' association with plague and plague's framing as a zoonotic disease entailed complex and shifting modes of multispecies relating. Bringing together anthropological and historical approaches to epidemiological reasoning and imagination, Prof. Lynteris examines the pandemic transformations of plague as a zoonotic disease and the implications of this epistemic and biopolitical process for the ways in which we approach zoonoses and pandemics to this day.