On ‘Pandemic Imaginary’: An Interview with Christos Lynteris

Abstract

Christos Lynteris is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews, UK. He is known for his work Human Extinction and the Pandemic Imaginary (Lynteris 2020), Anthropology of Epidemics (Kelly et al. 2019) and Plague and the City (Engelmann et al. 2018). The following interview was conducted via email. Ishita: Thank you for agreeing to do this interview. Can you share with our readers your journey in the study of epidemics and pandemic? Christos Lynteris: My engagement with epidemics as an anthropologist dates back to my PhD years at the University of St Andrews, when I studied the impact of three epidemics on state formation in modern China. After defending my PhD in 2010, I joined The Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) of the University of Cambridge, where I first led a 2-year research on the social ecology of plague in Inner Asia under a Mellon/Newton postdoctoral fellowship, and then a 5-year European Research Council Starting Grant on the visual representation of the third plague pandemic. Currently, I am leading a 5-year Wellcome Investigator Award project at the University of St Andrews on ‘The Global War Against the Rat and the Epistemic Emergence of Zoonosis’. Throughout this research trajectory, my main interest has been zoonotic diseases, that is, diseases that spread from animals to humans, with a particular focus on plague. Zoonotic diseases often lead to epidemics or pandemics, like the current COVID19 pandemic, but I would like to stress that my interest is not solely on Interview