Julia Hauser is a senior lecturer in Modern History at the University of Kassel, Germany, and an alumnus 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). Sarnath Banerjee has published five works of graphic fiction: Corridor (Penguin, 2004), The Barn Owl's Wondrous Capers (Penguin, 2007), The Harappa Files (HarperCollins, 2011), All Quiet in Vikaspuri (HarperCollins, 2015) and Doab Dil (Penguin, 2019). In collaboration with historians, Banerjee had produced ‘Liquid History of Vasco Da Gama' for the Kochi Biennial 2014, and ‘The Poona Circle', a series of vandalized history textbooks, for the Pune Biennale 2017. He has been a fellow of the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart; Indian Foundation for the Arts, Bangalore; and MacArthur Foundation. He received the Belknap fellowship, Princeton, and the CAST fellowship, MIT, in 2019.
<p style="padding: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 14px; margin-left: 0px; color: rgb(15, 17, 17); font-family: "Amazon Ember", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"><span class="a-text-italic" style="font-style: italic !important;">I wake up shivering and with a sore throat. Is it Covid? I grab a test kit and wait for the result. Luckily all is well. Most likely I have just caught a harmless cold...</span>This scenario has become painfully familiar to us. India was one of the countries hit hardest by the Covid pandemic, with a tragically high number of casualties. The pandemic also made some things an integral part of our lives: wearing masks, sanitizing, social distancing, isolating oneself.</p><p style="padding: 0px; margin: -4px 0px 14px; color: rgb(15, 17, 17); font-family: "Amazon Ember", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">None of this, however, is unique-even though the Covid virus was a new one. Over the centuries, wave after wave of the devastating plague pandemic had impacted humanity in similar ways, and the responses to the threats it posed had been similar too. From sixth-century Constantinople and fourteenth-century Europe to Islamic Spain, seventeenth-century London, eighteenth-century Aleppo, and Hong Kong, Bombay, San Francisco and South Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the history of the plague is, in a way, the story of modern civilization.<span class="a-text-italic" style="font-style: italic !important;">The Moral Contagion</span> is an insightful and absorbing take on that story. Based on Julia Hauser's rigorous scholarship and enhanced by Sarnath Banerjee's wry illustrations, this utterly gripping book playfully melds meticulous research with imaginative storytelling to create a graphic narrative about pandemics and reflect on how societies and individuals tend to react when faced with an adversary that is, literally, larger than life.</p>
