School of Humanities | Sgoil nan Daonnachdan

A virtual research and public engagement initiative from the School of Humanities

Last updated: 26 June 2020
[We will be updating this page with new content regularly]

We're living through an uncertain and unsettling period, but academics across the Humanities are well placed to uncover links between research in their different fields and what's happening in the world today. We would like to share some research and scholarship at the University of Glasgow in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. #Human_ties has several aims: 

• To 'ground' or 'tie' the events we're living through, unprecedented in our own lifetimes, in alternative and long-view perspectives from Humanities research, and to communicate these to the university and wider public.
• To think about how the past - whether in historical, archaeological, philosophical, classical, technical or other terms - can inform a future living with, or after, the coronavirus.
• To consider how we might reflect and adapt to working in new circumstances - for example, by engaging rapidly with new digital communication methods, or learning how to sustain ourselves in altered and isolated circumstances.

You'll find links to a range of material by our colleagues here, and we hope you find it useful. Please comment and feedback at @UofGHumanities #Human_ties

• Professor Sam Cohn: Face masks: what the Spanish flu can teach us about making them compulsory
• Dr Julia McClure: Pandemic Politics and the Past: History and the Future of Global Inequality 
• Dr Maud Bracke and other colleagues and students in the Centre for Gender History: Gendering the Pandemic
• Professor Ben Colburn (with Dr Paddy McQueen and Dr Joel Smith): Goals, perspective and anxiety: Three philosophy nuggets to help you during lockdown
• Professor Ben Colburn: Autonomy under Lockdown
• Professor Lynn Abrams: Textile Craft and Covid-19
• Dr Kenny Brophy: Lockdown megalith
• Professor Maria Economou co-moderates the online session ‘Universeum Voices during COVID19: Reconnecting Online’ organised by UNIVERSEUM (the European Academic Heritage Network) on how university museums and their staff across Europe are dealing with the challenges and opportunities that the pandemic has brought.
• Professor Cohn and Dr Mona O'Brien: Contact tracing: how physicians used it 500 years ago to control the bubonic plague
• Professor Sarah Cook's curated project Sleep Mode - art works, texts and discussions reflecting on the theme of 'always-on' culture and the 'new normal' we can create in a post-lockdown world. Online from Somerset House, from 23 June 2020
• Katharine McCrossan (PhD student): Human Ties - A second second wave

Related research in other areas of the University:

• Dr Nicky Reeves (Hunterian Curator) wrote about museums, contemporary collecting, PPE, social distancing, touching and not touching, haptics, class-shaming, hoarding, disposal, visibility, displaying, and loneliness #museums
• Dr Mirna Solic (School of Modern Languages and Cultures): Why don’t we hear about the low number of coronavirus deaths in Central Europe? 

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First published: 17 May 2020