Welcome to the 290th of the COVIDCalls, a daily discussion of the COVID-19 pandemic with a diverse collection of disaster experts. My name is Scott Gabriel Knowles, I am a historian of disasters at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.  I’m coming to you live from Daejeon, SK.
Travis Chi Wing Lau joined the Kenyon faculty in 2020 and is Assistant Professor of English. His research and teaching focuses on the intersections between literature and medicine and the longer histories of disability and pathology. Lau is currently working on a book manuscript entitled “Insecure Immunity: Inoculation and Anti-Vaccination, 1720-1898”, which explores the British cultural history of immunity and vaccination in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Alongside his scholarship, Lau frequently writes for venues of public scholarship like Synapsis: A Journal of Health Humanities, Public Books, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. His poetry has appeared in Barren Magazine, Wordgathering, Glass, The New Engagement and in two chapbooks.