Visual Culture and Pandemic Imagination
This lecture examines how the notion and experience of the “pandemic” emerged for the first time at the end of the nineteenth century, and how this new and profoundly modern framing of epidemic events was fostered not simply by the development of bacteriology but also by the application, for the first time, of photography to capturing images of infectious disease outbreaks. The lecture will elucidate the ways in which, since its emergence, this visual culture has impacted our pandemic imagination in relation to topics that have once again become prominent in the public sphere during the Covid-19 pandemic, such as mask-wearing, vaccination, quarantine, and the transmission of disease from animals to humans.
Lecture and Q&A: Thursday 7 July 2022, 6pm to 8pm
Small group session with lecturer and facilitator (credited option only): Wednesday 13 July, 6pm to 7pm
Speaker
Professor Christos Lynteris
Social Anthropology
Christos Lynteris is Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of St Andrews. He has established the field of the anthropological study of zoonotic diseases and has pioneered new approaches to the anthropology of epidemics through the combination of ethnographic, archival and visual approaches. He has published ten books, the most recent, on the subject of the emergence of epidemic photography to appear this autumn by MIT Press.
Copyright: Wellcome Trust