Louis Green Lecture: The Pandemic in Three Words

The COVID-19 pandemic introduced what many believed to be a new vocabulary into our collective lives. But was it actually new? Is it possible that the world began speaking Italian without knowing it? In this talk I want to explore three of the most common words of the pandemic era: quarantine, mask, and community in order to uncover and think about their deep roots in Italian culture. Drawing on literary and philosophical sources from Boccaccio to Manzoni to contemporary Italian philosophy, as well as my personal experience living in both Italy and the United States during the lockdown, I want to ask how providing  the Italian context for these words can enrich our understanding of the pandemic. Language, as I discuss in my presentation. is not only an instrument we use to describe what we have experienced, but also contours our memory of that experience. What can we learn by returning to the origin of these words and how might that understanding of the pandemic help us in future moments of crisis and community?

Timothy Campbell is Professor of Italian in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University. His academic work focuses on the intersection of language, experience, and society; his recent research centers on contemporary Italian thought and the politics of Covid. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he was part of an international group of scholars investigating how governments across the globe instituted social distancing protocols, a project informed by his personal experience of the pandemic in both the United States and Italy. This perspective shapes his current work as Principal Investigator for the  project, "The Biopolitics of Global Health After Covid."