Seeking contributors for a 3-4 person panel on "Plague Years: Pandemic and Pestilence in the Long Eighteenth Century."

For the past year and a half, Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year has been flying off bookstore shelves so fast they've had difficulty keeping it in stock, possibly for the first time since the book was first published in 1722. Last March, Isobel Grundy remarked in a six-minute interview on NPR's "All Things Considered" upon the similarities between the COVID-19 global shutdown and the smallpox pandemic that swept through London and Boston exactly 300 years ago, in the Spring of 1721: "There were people dying all over the place.... social life came to a standstill and all the things we've suddenly become familiar with again" played out on the transatlantic stage. Are there lessons to be learned from our eighteenth-century predecessors? Or can we see some interesting parallels?

 Further information about the SCSECS conference can be found at http://www.scsecs.net/scsecs/2022/scsecs_cfp_2022.html

Please send abstracts to Susan Spencer, University of Central Oklahoma: sspencer@uco.edu