EP #318 - 08.10.2021 - Race, Epidemiology, and Race w/guest host Jacob Steere-Williams

Welcome to the 318th 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. Jim Downs is the Gilder Lehrman NEH Chair of Civil War Era Studies and History at Gettysburg College. He is the author of two widely-acclaimed books, Sick From Freedom: African American Sickness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction, published Oxford University Press in 2012, and Stand By Me: the Forgotten History of Gay Liberation, published with Basic Books in 2016. In herculean fashion Jim has also edited for anthologies and dozens of articles, essays, and op-eds, and regularly appears in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Slate, The New York Times, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the LA Review of Books. He is the co-series editor with Catherine Clinton of History in the Headlines. His forthcoming book, Maladies of Empire: How Slavery, Colonialism, and War Transformed Medicine, is due out soon with Harvard University Press- you can now pre-order your own copy, which I highly suggest you do. Maladies of Empire is a pathbreaking project on the global origins and entanglements of epidemiology with colonialism, race, and warfare in the 18th and 19th centuries.