Vol. 11 No. 1 (2023): Victorian Contagion
Kari Nixon, Research Fellow
(Norwegian University of Science and Technology)
In the initially published version of Vol. 11 “Victorian Contagion”, most footnotes were missing. This has now been corrected.
Those few of us who have made our careers by contemplating Victorian notions of contagion were, perhaps, surprised to find the public suddenly hungry for the topic in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic’s beginnings. Not that the topic was ever a seemingly esoteric choice to those of us who selected it as our field specialty, but while most academic research is by definition found amid niche
topics, to be a self-avowed ‘contagious disease scholar’ before COVID-19 was typically met with surprise, even from other niche academics. Thus, while the relevance of contagion to society was always, perhaps, clear to those of us ‘niche’ specialists, we were not, generally, wont to find others so keenly aware of the
relevance of our studies to modern life.