Welcome to the 423nd 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 South Carolina, and I’m thrilled to be hosting the program this week.
Dr. Susan Jones is the Distinguished McKnight University Pressor in Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior, and in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the University of Minnesota. Trained first as a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine, Dr. Jones also received a PhD in the history of science and medicine at Penn. Her expertise is the historical ecology of disease, comparative and environmental health, and human-animal relationships. Dr. Jones is the recipient of both Guggenheim and Fullbright Fellowships, and is the author of the 2003 book Valuing Animals: Veterinarians and their Patients in Modern America, the 2010 book Death in a Small Package: A Short History of Anthrax, and dozens of scholarly articles and book chapters. She currently is working on a global environmental history of plague.
Dr. Pratik Chakrabarti is the Cullen NEH Chair in History at the University of Houston. He has written extensively on the history of science, medicine, and imperialism in South Asia, the Atlantic World, and the Caribbean from the 18th to the 20th centuries. Dr. Chakrabarti is the author of several stunning books, including Western Science in Modern India (2004), Materials and Medicine (2010), Bacteriology in British India (2012), and the 2020 book, Inscriptions of Nature: Geology and the Naturalization of Antiquity. For several years he was both the Director of the Center for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the University of Manchester in the UK, and editor of the journal Social History of Medicine. Pratik is currently working on the history of postcolonial public health in India and on a project about global vaccine research.