The COVID-19 Pandemic as a world-historical event

British Academy/Wellcome Trust Conferences bring together scholars and specialists from around the world to explore themes related to health and wellbeing.

This conference shifts the focus on COVID-19 from a public health crisis to its status as a transformative historical event. Bringing together specialists from India, six African countries, Europe, and the United States, the conference provides a rare opportunity to develop a truly global and comprehensive understanding of the pandemic’s experiences and consequences. Speakers include medical practitioners working in community-based medicine in India, alongside experts in medicine and global health, economic modelling, sociology and the media, biopolitics, the history of science and technology, and senior medical officials.

By examining both differences and commonalities between experiences in the Global North and the Global South, the conference fosters an interdisciplinary and collaborative global historical perspective. This collective approach offers insight into the profound social, economic, and human impacts of Covid-19 and illuminates the ways in which the pandemic represented a significant rupture in contemporary life.

This is an interdisciplinary conference which proceeds from the assumption that scholars from a wide range of specialisations have important insights into the COVID-19 experience - medical doctors, public health experts, historians, economists, sociologists, political scientists, and practitioners of medical ethics and public health ethics, among others. This follows the WHO's own definition of health as "a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity."

Conference convenor

• Toby Green FBA, Kings College London
• Juliette Rouchier, Université Aix-Marseille
• Reginald Oduor, University of Nairobi
• T. Sundararaman, Jawaharlal Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education and Research (JIPMER)

Speakers

• Ana Lucia Araujo, Howard University
• Caitjan Gainty, King’s College London
• Darez Ahmed, State National Health Programme, Tamil Nadu, former Mission Director
• David Musoke, Makerere School of Public Health
• El Hadji Diallo Bâ, Université Cheikh Anta Diop
• Garrett Wallace Brown, University of Leeds
• Ingrid Hoofd, Utrecht University
• Joel Lim
• Juliette Rouchier, Université Aix-Marseille
• Laurent Mucchielli, Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS)
• Linda Gibson, Nottingham Trent University
• Muriel Blaive, University of Graz
• Toby Green FBA, Kings College London
• Olutayo Adesina, University of Ibadan / University of Manchester
• Polona Petek, University of Ljubljana
• Reginald Oduor, University of Nairobi
• Ruben Andersson, University of Oxford
• Samuel Adu-Gyamfi, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST)
• Suzan Nakalawa
• T. Sundararaman, Jawaharlal Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education and Research (JIPMER)
• Wahome Ngare, Kenyan Obstetrics and Gynaecological Association
• Yogesh Jain, Jan Swasthya Sahyog

Further information

Ticket Prices (per day)

• In-person: £40 standard | £20 concession
• Online: £10 standard | £6 concession

Hybrid, booking required.

Image credit: Eric Bediez.