Course Schedule

How has humanity responded to and represented pandemics, epidemics and other episodes of contagion in history? What are the roles of race, class and gender in the shaping of disease incidence? How does infectious disease define a life? What is the nature of individual existence when touched by plague? This course considers these questions and others through the study of historical, literary and cultural representations of some of the most influential pandemics and epidemics, covering a wide range of geographical places and time periods in French and Italian history from the Black Death in Tuscany during the Middle Ages to subsequent outbreaks of bubonic plague from Milan to Marseille in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to the spread of cholera and syphilis in the nineteenth century from Paris to Provence. In addition, the course explores the AIDS epidemic in twentieth-century France and the impact of COVID-19 on Italy in the twenty-first. Students examine a variety of primary and secondary sources, fiction and memoirs from French and Italian writers including Giovanni Boccaccio, Alessandro Manzoni, Albert Camus, and Hervé Guibert among others. Taught in English.

How has humanity responded to and represented pandemics, epidemics and other episodes of contagion in history? What are the roles of race, class and gender in the shaping of disease incidence? How does infectious disease define a life? What is the nature of individual existence when touched by plague? This course considers these questions and others through the study of historical, literary and cultural representations of some of the most influential pandemics and epidemics, covering a wide range of geographical places and time periods in French and Italian history from the Black Death in Tuscany during the Middle Ages to subsequent outbreaks of bubonic plague from Milan to Marseille in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to the spread of cholera and syphilis in the nineteenth century from Paris to Provence. In addition, the course explores the AIDS epidemic in twentieth-century France and the impact of COVID-19 on Italy in the twenty-first. Students examine a variety of primary and secondary sources, fiction and memoirs from French and Italian writers including Giovanni Boccaccio, Alessandro Manzoni, Albert Camus, and Hervé Guibert among others. Taught in English.