Whereas the Black Death was reason to cultivate individualism, our own pandemic leads to an opposite conclusion: our need to help one another.

Chandra Mukerji
Chandra Mukerji is professor emerita of the Department of Communication and Science Studies Program at the University of California, San Diego. She writes about early modernity and the power of imagination, describing the plague and the birth of the modern self in Modernity Reimagined: An Analytic Guide (Routledge, 2017). She is particularly concerned with forms of popular knowledge, and how ordinary people exercise extraordinary power.