Public Books
David Barnes
Public Books
a magazine of ideas, arts, and scholarship
  • Essays
  • Interviews
  • Sections
    • View All
    • Anthropology & Religion
    • Art
    • Borderlands
    • Capitalism
    • Digital Humanities
    • Film
    • Global Black History
    • Higher Education
    • Literary Fiction
    • Literature in Translation
    • Poetry
    • Politics
    • Print/Screen
    • Sociology
    • Sports
    • Systems and Futures
    • Technology
    • TV
    • Urbanism
    • Videogames
  • Series
    • View All
    • B-Sides
    • The Book That Made Me
    • Crisis Cities
    • An Engineer Reads a Novel
    • On Our Nightstands
    • Public Streets
    • Public Thinker
    • Quizzical
    • Shoptalk
    • Syllabi
    • Virtual Roundtables
    • @X
  • Partners
  • Donate
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
David S. Barnes

David Barnes

David Barnes is an associate professor of the history and sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is author of The Great Stink of Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Struggle against Filth and Germs (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006) and The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-Century France (University of California Press, 1995). icon

  • Visit website

Pandemic Syllabus

By David Barnes, Merlin Chowkwanyun, & Kavita Sivaramakrishnan

Disease has never been merely a biological phenomenon. Instead, all illnesses—including COVID-19—are social problems for humans to solve.

Get Our Weekly Newsletter

Most Viewed

  • Facial Recognition Is Only the Beginning
  • Writing the Latinx Bildungsroman
  • Intellectual Alchemists
  • Mend Your Ways
  • The Worst of All Possible Worlds?

Subscribe to RSS

Support Public Books

Editors’ Pick

  • Preexisting Conditions: What 2020 Reveals about Our Urban Future
    Thomas J. Sugrue 11.16.2020
  • About
  • Authors
  • Submissions
  • Advertise
  • Events
  • Contact
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram

Public Books Logo
© 2021 Public Books.TM All Rights Reserved