Welcome to the 317th episode of COVID-Calls, a daily discussion of the COVID-19 pandemic with a diverse collection of disaster experts. My name is Jacob Steere-Williams, I am a historian of public health at the College of Charleston, in Charleston, South Carolina. This week I will be the guest host of COVID-Calls while the program’s founder and host, Scott Knowles, takes a much-needed recharge.
Dr. Lukas Engelman is a Chancellor’s Fellow and Senior Lecturer of History and Biomedicine at the University of Edinburgh. He is a history of medicine and epidemiology, and has worked extensively on the history of HIV/AIDS and the Third Plague Pandemic. His current project, funded by a four-year ERC grant, is titled “The Epidemiological Revolution: A History of Epidemiological Reasoning in the Twentieth Century. You can find the project website by googling “The Epidemy,” and the active Twitter handle @EpidemyERC. Lukas is the author of two books, Mapping AIDS, with Cambridge University Press, in 2018, and, co-authored with Christos Lynteris (who appeared on COVID-Calls with Scott and Graham Mooney on September 8th, 2020), Sulphuric Utopias, published in 2020 with MIT. Sulphuric Utopias, an incredible book that I highly recommended examines the history of fumigation and maritime sanitation, was recently listed by The Guardian as one of 30 books to read to understand the world in 2020.