Professor Gillian Weiss recently co-authored a piece with Meredith Martin titled “The Art of Plague and Panic: Marseille, 1720.” The piece examines the rhetoric around “foreigners” during pandemics throughout history, using the depictions of the plague outbreak in Marseille in 1720 by painter Michele Serre as a catalyst for this examination. The piece concludes with a call to question our treatment of those who we now depend on keep our society functioning during our current pandemic: “When the dust clears from our own crisis, how will we honor the economically precarious men and women—the janitors, cashiers, nurses and delivery drivers, some of them the same undocumented immigrants President Trump accuses of threatening the health and prosperity of America—forced to do dangerous work to keep us afloat?”

Read the entire piece here.