EP#319 - 08.11.2021 - South Africa, HIV/AIDS, and Epidemiology w/Guest Host Jacob Steere-Williams

Welcome to the 319th episode of COVID-Calls, a daily discussion of the COVID-19 pandemic with a diverse collection of disaster experts. My name is Jacob Steere-Williams, I am a historian of public health at the College of Charleston, in Charleston, South Carolina. This week I will be the guest host of COVID-Calls while the program’s founder, Scott Knowles, takes a much-needed recharge.

Dr Mandisa Mbali joined the Department of Historical Studies in 2017 from Stellenbosch University, where she taught Social Anthropology. She obtained her doctoral degree in Modern History at Oxford University.  Her main research interest is in health policy and activism, considered historically, as interrelated phenomena, both transnationally and within South Africa. Dr Mbali has explored this theme in book chapters and journal articles on AIDS activism and policies, health, gender and sexuality and the politics of race and ethics in international health.  In 2013 she published her scholarly monograph South African AIDS Activism and Global Health Politics with Palgrave Macmillan as part of their Global Ethics series: this monograph was completed during postdoctoral fellowships at Yale University and the University of KwaZulu-Natal.  More recently, her work has analysed transnational debates over apartheid and medical humanitarianism in late twentieth century South Africa.  She is also working towards developing a comparative historical approach to examining the global health politics of AIDS and COVID-19. 

Dr. Dora Vargha is Professor of History and Medical Humanities at the University of Exeter in the UK. Dora’s expertise is on the  history of epidemics, the politics of health, and Cold War history. Dr. Vargha’s interests span from the politics of epidemic management to public health systems and access to therapeutics. Her book, Polio Across the Iron Curtain: Hungary's Cold War with an Epidemic was published open access in 2018 with Cambridge University Press. She has also written on the global infrastructure of diphtheria antitoxin, the politics of vaccination in Eastern Europe, hospital care of disabled children in communist cotexts, and about shifting epidemic narratives in historical analysis. Dr. Vargha is currently working on a couple of different research projects, After the End of Disease, which pushes back on conventional narratives of epidemic bell-curves, and a second project, Socialist Medicine: An Alternative Global health History. Dora is also co-editor of the journal Social History of Medicine.