Live Event: Living with Pandemics: Finding New Narratives

In conversation with Dr Erica Charters and Robin Gorna. TORCH Goes
Digital! presents a series of weekly live events Big Tent - Live
Events! Performance Week​ Part of the Humanities Cultural
Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A.
Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. How have societies responded
to pandemics, throughout the world, and throughout time? What are
the new narratives, meanings and cultures that emerge and shape
emerging realities? As this conversation will remind us, there is
no simple answer to the problem of disease – but disease is also
far more than a medical or scientific problem. Robin Gorna will
draw on her experiences with social movements and cultural
responses to AIDS since the 1980s, which brought hope and massive
social change in the midst of rage and death. She will discuss the
many connections between the two pandemics - of cultural change,
politics and people and emerging narratives, with reflections on
her current experience of living with Covid-19 in her own body.
Erica Charters will discuss a just-published special issue of
Centaurus on ‘The history of epidemics in the time of COVID-19’,
reflecting on how the discipline of the history of science and
medicine has responded to the current pandemic. Sharing historical
approaches to understanding disease, she will explore how
historians have framed pandemics and what a long-term context might
offer for our understanding of COVID-19. Biographies: Dr Erica
Charters (History Faculty and Wolfson College) examines the history
of war, disease, and bodies, particularly in the British and French
empires. Her current research focuses on manpower during the
eighteenth century, examining the history of bodies as well as the
history of methods used to measure and enhance bodies, labour, and
population as a whole, including the history of statistics. Since
disease was the biggest threat to manpower in the early modern
world, Erica looks at how disease environments – throughout the
world – shaped military, commercial, and agricultural power, as
well as how overseas experiences shaped European theories of
medicine, biology, and race alongside political methodologies such
as statistics and censuses. Erica's monograph Disease, War, and the
Imperial State: The Welfare of British Armed Forces during the
Seven Years War (Chicago, 2014) traces how responses to disease
shaped military strategy, medical theory, and the nature of British
imperial authority (awarded the AAHM 2016 George Rosen Prize and
the SAHR 2014 Best First Book). To read more about Erica's recent
publication, please visit:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/16000498 Robin Gorna is an
AIDS activist and feminist who has led global and local campaigns
and organisations, including SheDecides (the global women’s rights
movement that she co-founded 2017), the Partnership for Maternal,
Newborn and Child Health (hosted by WHO), International AIDS
Society, and Australian Federation of AIDS Organisations. She set
up the global AIDS Team for DFID (Department for International
Development) in 2003, and then moved to South Africa to lead the
UK’s regional and national HIV and health programmes. She
co-founded, and now chairs, the St John’s College Women’s Network.
She studied Theology but spent far too much time involved in
student drama until the end of her 2nd year when she saw an early
performance of The Normal Heart (by Larry Kramer) and signed up as
a volunteer with the UK’s new AIDS Charity, the Terrence Higgins
Trust. She remains fascinated by the ways in which culture and the
arts inspire social movements, including the global AIDS response.
She publishes regularly and wrote one of the earliest books on
women, Vamps, Virgins and Victims: how can women fight AIDS? She’s
now working on a feminist memoir exploring a life lived between two
pandemics. For more information, please visit Robin Gorna's website
here: www.robingorna.com