About the Project
This project aimed to study what we refer to as the "lifetimes of epidemics", which include the lifetimes and mutation times of microbes, the speed of the transmission of pathogens, and the lifetimes of the human body, as well as the temporal arrangements involved in global health governance, response and control.
We explored the temporal experiences and arrangements at work in biopolitical concepts and practices, in which biological, political, scientific, technological, and social temporalities combine to form "temporal arrangements", which serve to govern human lives. The long-term planning-horizon of biosecurity and the event-like immediacy of an epidemic are only two of the most striking examples. A lot of work has been done on the history of epidemics, not least on the biography of specific diseases.
The objective of this project was to combine medical history, global history, conceptual history, media history, and literary criticism, in order to create a richer, more complex picture of the epidemic event. Furthermore, event was used as an analytic term, even a prism, to gain a synchronic transnational view of what is happening in different places, such as Oslo and Istanbul.
The project mapped and studied the outbreak and transmission of plague across the Ottoman Empire and into Europe, based on Ottoman, Italian and Dutch archives from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century.
Objectives
The primary goals of this project were:
- Show how lifetimes of epidemics form through the entanglement and synchronization of different forms of time as well as different forms of life. Investigate how biological and medical temporalizations combine with social and political concepts and practices to form temporal arrangements which precondition and form the epidemic event.
Secondary:
- Conceptual: Map the set of concepts used to describe the epidemic event, and explore how these concepts have moved and been translated, both in time and in space.
- Historical: Study the history of epidemic events and transmissions across the Middle East and Europe from the early modern period through to the nineteenth century.
- Theoretical: Expand the theory of multiple temporalities to also include biological and medical times. Study conflicting times at the intersection between natural sciences, humanities scholarship and social practice.
Financing
This project was financed by the Research Council of Norway for the period 1.11.2018 - 30.06.2023