26 May 2020 2:30pm - 4:30pm Online session

Description

This session has moved online. Open to all but please email  Mezna Qato if you wish to participate and receive more information.


Christos Lynteris (Department of Social Anthropology, Unversity of St Andrews)

 

Abstract

Christos Lynteris will be discussing his recent book 'Human Extinction and the Pandemic Imaginary' with a particular focus on two topics explored in the book: a) the question of whether the “next pandemic” is an existential threat to humanity which is imagined and anticipated in terms of established tropes and mentalities of a secular apocalypse; b) the question of what the post-pandemic condition, or the way we imagine humanity's relation with the world, after the “next pandemic” tells us about the way in which we conceive human/non-human relations, and the place of humanity in the world. The two questions are linked by the role of human mastery over the relation between humanity and “nature” in contemporary imaginaries about what it is to be human.

Bio

Dr Christos Lynteris is a medical anthropologist. His research focuses on the anthropological and historical examination of infectious disease epidemics, animal to human infection (zoonosis), medical visual culture, epidemiological epistemology, colonial medicine, global health, and epidemics as events posing an existential risk to humanity.

Funded by the Wellcome Trust with an Investigator Award in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Dr Lynteris' new project (2019-2024) The Global War Against the Rat and the Epistemic Emergence of Zoonosis will examine the global history of a foundational but historically neglected process in the development of scientific approaches of zoonosis: the global war against the rat (1898-1948).

Funded by the European Research Council with a Starting Grant (under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme/ERC grant agreement no 336564), Dr Lynteris' recently completed project Visual Representations of the Third Plague Pandemic (2013-2018) collected and analysed photographs and other visual documents of the third plague pandemic (1855-1959).

Before joining St Andrews, Dr Lynteris was Andrew Mellon and Isaac Newton Postdoctoral Fellow (2011-2013) and ERC Principal Investigator/Senior Research Associate (2013-2107) at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) of the University of Cambridge. He was a Visiting Fellow at Wolfson College (Cambridge, 2011-2013), and an affiliated academic member of staff at the Department of Social Anthropology of the University of Cambridge from 2011 to 2017. He has also been a Resident Fellow at the Centro Incontri Umani (Ascona, 2011) and at the Fondation Brocher (Geneva, 2017).

 

 

To receive more information, please contact: Mezna Qato

Open to all. No registration required.
An event organised by Archives of the Disappeared: Discipline and Method Amidst Ruin Network
Administrative assistance: networks@crassh.cam.ac.uk

Upcoming Events

CENTRE FOR RESEARCH IN THE ARTS, SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES

Tel: +44 1223 766886
Email enquiries@crassh.cam.ac.uk