RLL 306SEM—Gender and the Plague Microworld: Women and Science

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has brought to our attention an often-neglected aspect of these sanitary emergencies: namely, the fact that pandemics have a different impact on different genders. This course traces a cultural history of the intersection between gender and pandemics in the Western world through a combination of primary and secondary sources ranging from classical antiquity to the present day, in order to understand how pandemics (largely understood as disease outbreak, whether real or perceived) affect and are in turn affected by issues of gender.