Melissa Nicolas (she/her/hers)

Associate Professor of English

Washington State University

Description of Work:

I have three projects in the RHM in process at the moment. The first–and the one I bring with me to this event–is titled, “Seeing Double: Enduring Pandemic Images and the Socio-Materiality of Health Crises.” In this article, I surface the similarities between iconic photos from the 1918 Spanish Flu with emerging iconic images from Covid-19, postulating that these consistent images of public (re)actions to epidemics point to the ways socio-material circumstances fuel the public health crises that accompany epidemic disease.

A second work in progress, The Covid Narrative Collection (CNC), is part of my Center for Arts and Humanities fellowship for 2020-2021. My goal for the CNC is to create a digital, open-access, inclusive, national archive of COVID stories. The impetus for this project was my work with the Spanish flu and the relative lack of first-person accounts that have endured. As we know, we are living through an historical moment that will reverberate for generations to come, and I want to capture these first-had accounts before too much time has passed and individual stories get lost to formal history. If you know of anyone who has been collecting such stories and would like a place to publish them, please reach out!

My aspirational work, in its incubation stage, is a look at the community of knowledge and practice that Edward Jenner drew on to create the smallpox vaccine. In this article, I want to focus on the practice of variolation brought to the US by enslaved peoples, the importance of folk medicine (largely from women) to Jenner’s thinking, and the role that community played in the development of the vaccine with the goal of disrupting the “great man” version of history that currently surrounds the story of the first vaccine.

Contact: melissa.nicolas@wsu.edu