Pandemic Re-Awakenings: The Forgotten and Unforgotten ‘Spanish’ Flu of 1918-1919 book cover.
Guy Beiner, Sullivan Chair of Irish Studies at Boston College, has published the edited volume Pandemic Re-Awakenings: The Forgotten and Unforgotten ‘Spanish’ Flu of 1918-1919 (Oxford University Press). Beiner, whose expertise is the history of remembering and forgetting in the late-modern era, has a long-standing interest in the Great Flu and how it was overshadowed in mainstream historiography and public memory by the Great War. While the historical study of this catastrophic pandemic was neglected for decades, in recent years the topic has attracted increasing attention (including the publication of three monographs on Ireland).
Ahead of the centenary year, Prof. Beiner brought together researchers who specialize in the study of the pandemic in areas around the world for an innovative international collaboration, which allowed him to develop on a global scale the theories of ‘social forgetting’ that he had introduced in his previous prize-winning book Forgetful Remembrance: Social Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in Ulster.
Challenging a simplistic notion of the ‘forgotten pandemic’, the volume offers a multi-level and multi-faceted exploration of a century of remembering, forgetting and rediscovering ‘Spanish’ Flu in the interrelated spheres of personal, communal, medical, and cultural histories. The project acquired new relevance following the outbreak of Covid-19, offering insightful historical perspective into concerns on how the current pandemic may be eventually recalled.
This Spring, Prof. Beiner is teaching a course on The ‘Spanish’ Flu Pandemic: History, Memory, Forgetting and Rediscovery.