10 – 11 December 2012
PANIC traces histories of collective panics from nineteenth-century Guangdong to twenty-first century New York. Speakers explore ‘panic’ as a ‘disorder’ produced by networks of empire and state-sponsored responses to epidemics. They consider the ‘contagiousness’ of panic in relation to the disruptive feedbacks created by novel technologies of global communication.
When, how, and why did ‘panic’ become a sociological and scientific phenomenon to be managed and prevented? What can the past teach us about disease threats and panics to come?
Programme
| Day 1 | |
|---|---|
| 10:00 – 10:15 | Coffee Welcome |
| 10:15 – 12:30 | Session I Chair: Dr. Mark Hampton (Lingnan University) Dr. Kerry Ward (Rice University) ‘Seaborne Scourge: Local Responses to Disease at the Cape from the 18th to 20th Centuries’ Professor John M. Carroll (University of Hong Kong) ‘Slow Burn: Western Concerns about Fire in Pre-Opium War Canton’ Dr. James Beattie (University of Waikato) ‘A “shock which … can scarcely be understood”: Health Panics, Migration, and Plant Exchange between India and Australia Post-1857’ Q&A |
| 12:30 – 14:15 | Break |
| 14:15 – 16:30 | Session II Chair: Professor Frank Dikötter (University of Hong Kong) Professor David Arnold (University of Warwick) ‘The Dog that Didn’t Bark: Comparing the Plague and Influenza Epidemics in British India, 1896-1919’ Dr. Joao Rangel de Almeida (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science) ‘Performing Empires in a Sick World: the 1851 International Sanitary Conference and Mediterranean Sovereignty Bargains’ Dr. Robert Peckham (University of Hong Kong) ‘Panic Encabled: Epidemics and the ‘Telegraphic World’ ’Q&A |
| Day 2 | |
| 09:45 – 10:00 | Coffee |
| 10:00 – 12:00 | Session III 10:00am – 12:00pm Chair: Professor Richard Fielding (University of Hong Kong) Professor Amy L. Fairchild (Columbia University) ‘Panic’s Progress: From Chaos, to Containment, to Crisis Management’ Dr. Nicholas King (McGill University) ‘The Iconography of New Infectious Threats, 1936-2009’Q&A |
| 12:00 – 14:15 | Break |
| 14:15 – 15:15 | Round Table Discussion |