| Credits | 1 |
| Restrictions | Instr perm req during Drop/Add |
| Pre-Requisites | |
| Co-Requisites | |
| Core Area | |
| Area of Inquiry | Human Thought and Expression |
| Liberal Arts Practices |
Plagues, pandemics, and epidemics have visited fear, chaos, and death upon global communities and nations for millennia. Catastrophes like the Bubonic Plague of 14th century Europe (1348-50), plagues in the Ottoman capital (1522-921), early modern Africa (1494-1554), China (1770/71), and the 1918 American Flu pandemic, among others, precipitated world-shattering disruptions that mandated rapid and comprehensive recalibrations of social constructions of normalcy, social identity, and socio-cultural cohesion. The course identifies religion as a requisite multidimensional construct situated at the intersection of interdisciplinary theorizing and explanatory models regarding the etiologies of, and responses to, death-dealing disease and contagion. Religious understandings of calamitous plagues, pandemics, and epidemics are juxtaposed with the rise of medical and scientific understandings of these maladies within discrete periods.