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The Covid-19 History Project: Undergraduate Research and Public History during a Pandemic
- Mary Culler
- Madeline Altobelli
- Bethany Stewart
- Grace Barth
- Danielle Green
- Andrew Grant
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Category: Uncategorized
Description: The Covid-19 History Project explores the question of how history can inform current understanding of the Covid-19 pandemic. During the fall 2020 semester, a team of five undergraduate history majors and a graduate student in history, all at Virginia Tech, worked in collaboration with the American Historical Association (AHA), on a joint project to examine historians’ writings about the Covid-19 pandemic. The Virginia Tech team wrote reviews of nearly one hundred articles, essays, podcasts, and interviews by historians connecting the current epidemic to earlier historical processes, events, and people. The summaries of the articles will be published by the AHA in early 2021, as part of their Covid-19 in historical perspective project, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. In addition, each student researched and wrote their own essay, building on a selection of articles, that addressed key themes in the historical understanding of the Covid-19 epidemic. The five essays written by the student researchers are available from the project website, and will be linked to the AHA remote teaching resource page. This panel contributes to understanding the Covid-19 epidemic by exploring the ways that historians made sense of contemporary events using perspectives from the past. The research significance of this project was the use of analytical skills associated with the history major (critical reading, evidence-based arguments, collaborative editing, and analytical writing) yet with the purpose of making this research widely available to the public as well as academic audiences. The pedagogical significance of this project included the development of collaborative research and writing skills, the engagement with an external partner, and a review process that involved students, a graduate teaching assistant, a faculty member, and five professional historians from the AHA. The project used collaboration tools, including a shared drive, spreadsheets, and documents, while the final products will be posted using zotero, airtable, and google sites.