An Evening with Dr. Edna Bonhomme and Dr. Terri Francis

***Please note: This event will take place at the Books & Books in Coral Gables at 265 Aragon Ave. Tickets are FREE and books will be available for purchase at the event. Can't make the event or want your copy early?

A deeply reported, insightful, and literary account of humankind’s battles with epidemic disease, and their outsized role in deepening inequality along racial, ethnic, class, and gender lines—in the vein of Medical Apartheid and Killing the Black Body.
Epidemic diseases enter the world by chance, but they become catastrophic by human design.
With clear-eyed research and lush prose, A History of the World in Six Plagues shows that throughout history, outbreaks of disease have been exacerbated by and gone on to further expand the racial, economic, and sociopolitical divides we allow to fester in times of good health.
Princeton-trained historian Edna Bonhomme’s examination of humanity’s disastrous treatment of pandemic disease takes us across place and time from Port-au-Prince to Tanzania, and from plantation-era America to our modern COVID-19-scarred world to unravel shocking truths about the patterns of discrimination in the face of disease. Based on in-depth research and cultural analysis, Bonhomme explores Cholera, HIV/AIDS, the Spanish Flu, Sleeping Sickness, Ebola, and COVID-19 amidst the backdrop of unequal public policy. But much more than a remarkable history, A History of the World in Six Plagues is also a rising call for change.

Edna Bonhomme is the author of the forthcoming A History of the World in Six Plagues: How Contagion, Class, and Captivity Shaped Us, From Cholera to Covid-19. She is a historian of science, culture writer, and book critic whose work has appeared in Al Jazeera, the Atlantic, Esquire, Frieze, the Guardian, the Nation, the London Review of Books, the Washington Post, and more. She is a co-editor of After Sex, a collection of essays, poems, and short stories. A graduate of Princeton University’s Ph.D. program in History of Science, she held awards and fellowships from the Max Planck Institute for History of Science, the Ludwig Maximilian Universität, the Camargo Foundation, Baldwin for the Arts, the Robert Silvers Foundation, and the Andy Warhol Foundation. She was born and raised in Miami and has been based in Berlin, Germany since 2017.

Terri Francis is the author of Josephine Baker’s Cinematic Prism (Indiana University Press, 2021). She is Associate Professor of Cinematic Arts at the University of Miami. Dr. Francis’s research centers on innovators and adventurers in film during the early 20th century and the early 21st century. Her publications in Film History, Black Camera, Transition, Feminist Media Histories, SEEN, and Film Quarterly draw on archival research, wide-ranging interviews, historical contexts, and deep visual analysis, as she examines the refractions of black performance, creativity, and desires to see and be seen. She is a recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Grant.

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