Course description
In 1918-1919, the deadliest pandemic in history – a virulent influenza virus commonly referred to as 'Spanish Flu' – spread across the globe and left unparalleled havoc in the wake of the First World War. The course examines how, despite the enormity of the catastrophe, for most of the twentieth century its devastation was subject to cultural, social and historiographical neglect, uncovering its overlooked ramifications and legacies from the time of the events up to the popular rediscovery of public interest in consequence of the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic a century later.

Requirements

• Assignment 1: Iconic Photographs — 10%
• Assignment 2: Literary Representation — 15%
• Assignment 3: Eye-Witness Recollections — 15%
• Final Assignment: Memory/Forgetting — 40%
• Attendance and Participation - showing knowledge of bibliography — 20%

Course contents

Introduction: The History of Pandemics and 'Spanish' Influenza

Howard Phillips, 'Influenza Pandemic' in 1914-1918-online: International Encyclopedia of the First World War (2017), online: https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/influenza_pandemic

Christian W. McMillen, Pandemics: A Very Short Introduction (New York, 2016), pp. 1-6 ('Introduction')

Gina Kolata, Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), pp. ix-xi ['Prologue'].

* Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice and History (New Brunswick, 1935), pp. 150-165 (Ch. 8: 'On the influence of epidemic diseases on political and military history and on the relative unimportance of generals')

Virology and Epidemiology

Christian W. McMillen, Pandemics: A Very Short Introduction (New York, 2016), pp. 89-102 (ch. 6: 'Influenza')

Major Greenwood, 'A General Discussion of the Epidemiology of Influenza' (1919) in Ministry of Health (UK), Reports on Public Health and Medical Subjects, No. 4: Report on the Pandemic of Influenza, 1918-19 (London, 1920), selected extracts.

Niall P. A. S. Johnson and Juergen Mueller, 'Updating the Accounts: Global Mortality of the 1918-1920 "Spanish" Influenza Pandemic' in Bulletin of the History of Medicine 76, no. 1 (2002), pp 105-15.

War and Peace: The Great Flu and the Great War

Mark Osborne Humphries, 'Paths of Infection: The First World War and the Origins of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic' in War in History, 21, no. 1 (2014), pp 55-81.

Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., America's Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918 (Cambridge, 2003; 2nd. ed.), pp. 171-200 (Ch. 10: 'Flu and the Paris Peace Conference').

Howard Phillips, '"No Great War, No Great Flu. No Great Flu, No German Defeat"? : Reflections on Epic Epidemic Relationships' in Helmut Bley and Anorthe Kremers (eds.), The World During the First World War (Essen, 2014), pp. 303-14.

* Carol R. Byerly, Fever of War: The Influenza Epidemic in the U.S. Army During World War I (New York, 2005), pp. 97-124 (ch. 4: 'Fighting Germs and Germans: Influenza in the American Expeditionary Forces').

Visual Cultural Memory: art, film, photography

Assignment 1: Iconic Photographs (see separate instructions)

Alan Taylor, 'Photos of the 1918 Flu Pandemic', Atlantic, 10 April 2018; online: https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2018/04/photos-the-1918-flu-pandemic/557663/

Aubrey Knox, 'The Spanish Influenza Transformed Everyday Life, But Artists Struggled to Visualize Its Impact' in Art in America, 12 May 2020, online: https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/spanish-influenza-pandemic-art-history-1202686702/

Michael Lobel, 'Close Contact', Artforum, 21 April 2020, online: https://www.artforum.com/slant/michael-lobel-on-art-and-the-1918-flu-pandemic-82772

Jeremy Eichler, 'Searching for Art from the Spanish Flu' in Boston Globe, 10 May 2020, p. N1.

Julian A. Navarro, 'Influenza in 1918: An Epidemic in Images' in Public Health Reports, 125, Suppl. 3 (2010), pp 9-14.

Musical Cultural Memory: song

William Robin, 'The 1918 Pandemic's Impact on Music? Surprisingly Little' in New York Times, 6 May 2020.

Howard Phillips, In a Time of Plague: Memories of the 'Spanish' Flu Epidemic of 1918 in South Africa (Cape Town, 2018), pp. 156-7

Richard M. Moyle, Traditional Samoan Music (Auckland, N.Z., 1988), p. 242.

Nancy K. Bristow, 'The Practices of Social Forgetting: Rewriting, Obscuring and Silencing the 1918 Influenza Epidemic in the United States' in Guy Beiner (ed.), Pandemic Re-Awakenings: The Forgotten and Unforgotten 'Spanish' Flu of 1918–1919 (Oxford and New York, 2022), pp. 333-45 (esp. 333-5 and 340).

Literary Cultural Memory: literature

Assignment 2: Literary Representation (see separate instructions)

Katherine Anne Porter, Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939).

Virginia Woolf, 'On Being Ill' in The Moment, and Other Essays (London, 1947), pp. 14-24. Buchi Emecheta, The Slave Girl: A Novel (New York, 1977), selected excerpts

Patricia Clifford, 'Why Did So Few Novels Tackle the 1918 Pandemic?' in Smithsonian Magazine (November 2017), online: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/flu-novels-great-pandemic-180965205/

* Nancy K. Bristow, American Pandemic: The Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic (Oxford and New York, 2012), pp. 178-90 ('Narratives of Loss').

* Catherine Belling, 'Remembering and Reconstructing: Fictions of the 1918-19 Influenza Pandemic' in María-Isabel Porras-Gallo and Ryan A. Davis (eds.), The Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919: Perspectives from the Iberian Peninsula and the Americas (Rochester NY, 2014), pp 248-64.

Historiography

Guy Beiner, 'Out in the Cold and Back: New-Found Interest in the Great Flu' in Cultural and Social History, 3, no. 4 (2006), pp 496-505.

Howard Phillips, 'The Recent Wave of 'Spanish' Flu Historiography' in Social History of Medicine, 27, no. 4 (2014), pp 789-808.

Mark Honigsbaum, 'Why Historians Ignored the Spanish Flu', Conversation, 4 September 2018 (online): https://theconversation.com/why-historians-ignored-the-spanish-flu-101950

Personal Testimonies

Assignment 3: Eye-Witness Recollections (see separate instructions)

Howard Phillips, In a Time of Plague: Memories of the 'Spanish' Flu Epidemic of 1918 in South Africa (Cape Town, 2018), pp. 19-20, 74, 135, 164.

Geoffrey Rice, That Terrible Time: Eye-Witness Accounts of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic in New Zealand (Christchurch, New Zealand, 2018), pp. 60-62.

Richard Collier, The Plague of the Spanish Lady: The Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919 (London, 1974), pp. 21-55 (Chapter 2)

Pandemic Influenza Storybook (CDC), online: https://www.cdc.gov/publications/panflu/index.html

1918 Pandemic Influenza Survivors Share Their Stories (Alabama Department of Archives & History), online: https://www.alabamapublichealth.gov/pandemicflu/1918-influenza-survivor-stories.html

Varieties of Local, National and Global Remembering/Forgetting: Case Studies

From Guy Beiner (ed.), Pandemic Re-Awakenings: The Forgotten and Unforgotten 'Spanish' Flu of 1918–1919 (Oxford and New York, 2022):

Guy Beiner, 'The Great Flu between Remembering and Forgetting', pp. 1-48.

* Howard Phillips, 'The Silence of the Survivors: Why Did Survivors of the "Spanish" Flu in South Africa Not Talk About the Epidemic?', pp. 80-91.

* Claudio Bertolli Filho, '"Above All Else There Was Fear": Memories of the "Spanish" Flu in São Paulo, Brazil', pp. 92-106.

* Geoffrey Rice, '"The Fell Plague of Last Year": Remembering and Forgetting the 1918 Influenza Pandemic in New Zealand', pp. 169-86 (esp. pp. 169-72).

Rediscovery

Martin Kettle, 'A Century on, Why Are We Forgetting the Deaths of 100 Million?' in Guardian, 25 May 2018.

Hannah Mawdsley, 'World Remembers Spanish Flu Deaths' (Letter) in Guardian, 28 May 2018.

Richard Krause, 'The Swine Flu Episode and the Fog of Epidemics', Emerging Infectious Diseases, 12, no. 1 (January 2006): pp. 40-43.

Mark Honigsbaum, 'Spanish Influenza Redux: Revisiting the Mother of All Pandemics' in The Lancet, 391, no. 10139 (2018), pp 2492-95.

Guy Beiner, 'Rediscovering the Great Flu between Pre-Forgetting and Post-Forgetting' in Guy Beiner (ed.), Pandemic Re-Awakenings: The Forgotten and Unforgotten 'Spanish' Flu of 1918–1919 (Oxford and New York, 2022), pp. 346-76.

From Centennial Commemoration to Covid-19

Scott Hershberger, 'The Pandemic We Forgot', Scientific American, 325, no. 5 (November 2020): pp. 66-69.

Astrid Erll, 'Memory Worlds in Times of Corona' in Memory Studies, 13, no. 5 (2020), pp 861-74.

Podcast: 'The Covid Files 6: Spanish Flu Redux'. Going Viral podcast, 10 June 2020 (37:04 min.), online: https://directory.libsyn.com/episode/index/show/goingviralthepod/id/14775332

From Guy Beiner (ed.), Pandemic Re-Awakenings: The Forgotten and Unforgotten 'Spanish' Flu of 1918–1919 (Oxford and New York, 2022):

* Ida Milne, 'Changing Narratives of 'That' Pandemic: Re-Engaging with Oral Histories for the Centenary of the Great Flu in Ireland', pp. 107-19.

* Peter Hobbins, ''The Pneumonic Influenza Is Just Part of My Life': Fostering Community Histories of the 'Spanish' Influenza Pandemic in Australia', pp. 199-214.

Conclusion

Final Assignment (see separate instructions)

Guy Beiner, 'Rediscovering the Great Flu between Pre-Forgetting and Post-Forgetting' in Guy Beiner (ed.), Pandemic Re-Awakenings: The Forgotten and Unforgotten 'Spanish' Flu of 1918–1919 (Oxford and New York, 2022), pp. 346-76.

Last updated: April 2, 2026