Welcome
Join us in documenting our uncertain moment. We are acting not just as historians, but as chroniclers, recorders, memoirists, as image collectors. We invite you to share your stories about how the pandemic has affected our lives, from the mundane to the extraordinary, including the ways things haven't changed at all. Share your story in text, images, video, tweets, texts, Facebook posts, Instagram or Snapchat memes, and screenshots of the news and emails--anything that speaks to paradoxes of the moment. Imagine, as we are, what future historian might need to write about and understand this historical moment.
Our curatorial team spans the globe; below is a partial list of our curatorial team, a photographic directory will be forthcoming soon.
Also we are sharing related materials about Podcasts, exhibits, and other public engagements by the project.
Check out the curatorial team and learn about Podcast of a Plague Year by following these links.
What Stories Should You Share?
- Images: photographs, screen captures (including from your phone or laptop) of social media, media, communications, memes, and other expressions of the moment
- Audio histories
- Video clips--taken of the world, including yourself speaking, or of social media memes
- Links
- Text
- Files: emails, announcements, text messages, scientific documents, and flyers
Allow this Journal of the Plague Year to become your personal diary--a place where you share moments of your life, along with hundreds of others to create a historical record of the pandemic.
We imagine that there will be both traumatic and dislocating moments in this year of the pandemic, and ask you to share as you encounter them. The same is true for moments of unexpected joy--of spending more time with family or friends. Your contributions can and should come from the landscapes of your daily life, both in suburbs and cities, but also through the social media and interwebs that increasingly connect us. Stories can be deeply personal, political, or mundane. Help your communities to understand the extraordinary, as well as the ordinary of this moment. In the future, historians will be able to use this record of daily life to better understand the changing nature of our lives.
This archive took its title and inspiration from Daniel Defoe's novel of the same name. First published in March 1722 the novel, A Journal of the Plague Year, tells story of one man's experiences of the year 1665, in which the bubonic plague shook London.
A Journal of the Plague Year: An Archive of Covid-19 was initiated by Catherine O'Donnell, Richard Amesbury, and Mark Tebeau in the School for Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. The archive was seeded by funding from the public history endowment at Arizona State University, endowed by Noel Stowe. The project has emerged as a curatorial consortium that includes faculty and graduate students from around the United States and now the world.
Additional and significant funding for curators and design has been provided by Arizona State University: the Humanities Dean of the College for Liberal Arts & Sciences; the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies; the Institute for Humanities Research; and the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict through the Luce Foundation.
Curatorial Projects
Journal of a Plague Year features our partners through a series of archival collections that reflect localized and thematic collecting across the world.