In this episode, Wemmy Ogunyankin and Mary Rehman discuss Mary’s work on seventeenth-century plague journals, and diaries written during COVID-19 Lockdowns in the UK.

Listen as Mary expands the concept of ‘captivity’ beyond the prison narrative to include collective concepts of incarceration in the context of past and present pandemics, by answering questions on the following topics: 

• How Mary approached this research, and her methodological process with regards to selecting both early modern and twenty-first-century diaries.  
• Her current findings, including some surprising similarities between plague and COVID-19 experience, such as a vested interest in death tolls and official statistics, the appearance of cultures of blame, and the desire to reclaim joy.  
• The challenge of ensuring fair representation when it comes to working with personal writings.  
• How Mary navigated her personal feelings as she read the diaries, and how the content of Lockdown journals resonated with her own COVID-19 experience.  
• The importance of memorialising pandemic experience for future generations. 

Find the show notes at https://medium.com/@cultcaptpod

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.