History, Global Campus and OLLI to Offer Course 'COVID-19 and the History of Pandemics'

Nine faculty from the Department of History have joined to design and launch a new online one-credit course in fall 2020 to explore the connections between our current pandemic and how humans have experienced and responded to pandemics past. 

The UA Global Campus supported online credit course, COVID-19 & The History of Pandemics, will be offered in the first eight-week session (Aug. 24-Oct. 13) as HIST 406V-901. All students of any major are welcome and there are no prerequisites.

With support from Global Campus' Professional and Workforce Development unit, the course will also be offered to the general public in six self-paced online modules. Enrollment for these on-demand modules is open now. 

Each module costs $25 to access, or all six can be bundled for $125. U of A faculty, staff and current students receive a 10% discount. OLLI participants can sign up to access the on-demand modules and participate in synchronous discussion sessions with the departmental faculty who taught each module. Synchronous sessions will take place in November and December 2020.

As the COVID-19 pandemic has unfolded over the last several months, Americans have consistently looked towards past epidemics for lessons on how to respond to the current situation. 

Especially in the face of new, poorly-understood illnesses, the past can teach significant lessons to modern policymakers on how diseases spread, which methods have been effective to contain them, and how the population has responded to outbreaks that threatened individual lives, economies, and social structures.

"Historians have routinely been called upon by lawmakers around the world to consult on how the past informs our experience today — our team-taught course brings together expertise from across our department with expertise in countries spanning the globe to illustrate how citizens of the world fought against diseases from the Middle Ages to the present," said James Gigantino, professor and chair of the Department of History. 

"This course will call upon our credit students in their assignments to make policy recommendations for containing COVID-19, showing the relevancy of the past to our present. We are also very excited to partner with Global Campus to share our faculty's research and teaching with a broader public audience to help serve our university's land grant mission."

Participants in both the credit and non-credit versions of the course will explore multiple pandemics in modules designed by faculty including assistant professor Freddy Dominguez on the Bubonic Plague, professor Jim Gigantino on smallpox, Distinguished Professor Elliott West and instructor Anne Marie Martin on Yellow Fever, assistant professor Ren Pepitone on cholera, professor Trish Starks on the 1918 Flu, associate professor Todd Cleveland on HIV/AIDS, and assistant professor Kelly Hammond on the first emergence of COVID-19 in China. Instructor Michele Johnson will serve as the course coordinator. 

Starks, an expert in the history of medicine, will begin the credit class and each non-credit module with a lesson on the evolution of government interest in managing the health of their citizens.

Starks notes, "the history of public health is filled with as many stories of the interaction of ideas of governance as it is consideratons of medicine. When we make policy for an epidemic, we also make judgments about personal liberty, state responsibility, and the duties of citizenship. History gives us a great guide for knowing how these policies might play out."

The one-hour course will be available for credit for U of A students to enroll in on UA Connect. 

Non-credit students should register through Global Campus and OLLI participants through the OLLI website.