Epidemics and Their Metaphors
A lecture by Edna Bonhomme, organized by the Institute for Education in the Arts, Art and Education program.
This book lecture explores the shocking truths and deep inequality in care that have festered around the globe during six great plagues: cholera, HIV/AIDS, the Spanish Flu, Sleeping Sickness, Ebola, and COVID-19. In her book, A History of the World in Six Plagues: How Contagion, Class, and Captivity Shaped Us, from Cholera to COVID-19, Bonhomme uses in-depth research and cultural analysis to explore the history and impact of each devastating disease.
Edna Bonhomme is a critic, historian of science, and journalist. She earned her PhD in history from Princeton University and holds a bachelor's in Biology and a master's in Public Health. Edna Bonhomme has held awards and fellowships from the Max Planck Institute for History of Science, Camargo Foundation, Robert Silvers Foundation, and Andy Warhol Foundation. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Esquire, The Guardian, London Review of Books, The Nation, the New York Review of Books, and more publications. She is the author of A History of the World in Six Plagues and co-editor of After Sex, a literary anthology on abortion and reproductive justice. She has been living in Berlin since 2017.