The Moral Contagion von Julia Hauser und Sarnath Banerjee

The Moral Contagion is a collaborative work between the German historian Julia Hauser and the Indian comic artist Sarnath Banerjee. The book has been recently published. It is a cultural history of pandemics that also contains fictional elements. Parallels are drawn between historical events – the raging plague in Europe, North Africa and Asia (including India) – and the coronavirus pandemic.

Join us for a lively and stimulating discussion with Julia Hauser and Jahnavi Phalkey, filmmaker and historian of science, moderated by sociologist Gayatri Menon.

Julia Hauser is a senior lecturer in Modern History at the University of Kassel, Germany, and an alumna of the Arab–German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities (AGYA). Hauser was a fellow at the Orient Institut Beirut, Rice University, Houston/Texas, the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences Calcutta, and ICAS:MP, Delhi. Among her publications are German Religious Women in Late Ottoman Beirut. Competing Missions (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2015) and A Taste for Purity. An Entangled History of Vegetarianism. Columbia Studies in International and Global History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2023).

Jahnavi Phalkey is the Founding Director of Science Gallery Bengaluru. Prior to founding Asia’s first Science Gallery, Jahnavi was an academic based at King's College London. She has been a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, an external curator to the Science Museum London, and a Scholar-in-Residence at the Deutsches Museum, Munich. She is the author of Atomic State: Big Science in Twentieth Century India and co-edited Science of Giants: China and India in the Twentieth Century. She is also director and producer of the documentary film, Cyclotron.”
 
Gayatri Menon works on the political economy of development, focusing on urbanization, displacement, and questions of home. She has a PhD from Cornell University in Development Sociology. She has taught at the graduate and undergraduate levels and in India and the US. She also has extensive experience in the NGO sector, having worked on rural livelihoods and indebtedness in Maharashtra, on agricultural practices and politics in Garhwal, and on land tenure and housing rights.  She is currently working on a project on urban health with the Public Health Foundation of India's Ramalingaswami Centre on Equity and Social Determinants of Health.

Entry free! Copies of The Moral Contagion will be available for sale at the event!