A book reading and conversation with the authors of The Moral Contagion, Julia Hauser and Sarnath Banerjee. Hauser and Banerjee will be in conversation with Jaideep Unudurti, renowned Graphic Novelist.
Based on Julia Hauser’s rigorous scholarship and enhanced by Sarnath Banerjee’s wry illustrations, The Moral Contagion is an utterly gripping book which playfully melds meticulous research with imaginative storytelling to create a graphic narrative about pandemics from sixth-century Constantinople to late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and how it affected human relationships, systems of belief, knowledge and political power.
Julia Hauser is a senior lecturer in Modern History at the University of Kassel, Germany, and an alumna of the Arab–German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities (AGYA). Hauser was a fellow at the Orient Institut Beirut, Rice University, Houston/Texas, the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences Calcutta, and ICAS:MP, Delhi. Among her publications are German Religious Women in Late Ottoman Beirut. Competing Missions (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2015) and A Taste for Purity. An Entangled History of Vegetarianism. Columbia Studies in International and Global History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2023).
Sarnath Banerjee has published five works of graphic fiction: Corridor (Penguin, 2004), The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers (Penguin, 2007), The Harappa Files (HarperCollins, 2011), All Quiet in Vikaspuri (HarperCollins, 2015) and Doab Dil (Penguin, 2019). In collaboration with historians, Banerjee had produced ‘Liquid History of Vasco Da Gama’ for the Kochi Biennial 2014, and ‘The Poona Circle’, a series of vandalized history textbooks, for the Pune Biennale 2017. He has been a fellow of the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart; Indian Foundation for the Arts, Bangalore; and MacArthur Foundation. He received the Belknap fellowship, Princeton, and the CAST fellowship, MIT, in 2019.
Jaideep Unudurti is a journalist specializing in travel, leisure, books; he also has a special interest in chess. He writes for leading publications including The Indian Express, Man's World, MINT, The Hindu (Business Line) and the Economic Times. He is also a Contributing Editor at the Delhi Defence Review, a journal concerned with War and Ideas. Unudurti has covered a wide range of events from the rock band Guns N Roses’ performance to the world chess championship. He has received a development grant from CNAP, Paris to write a film with renowned director Amit Dutta. He is the creator of ‘Hyderabad: A Graphic Novel’, a unique city-centric approach to graphic storytelling. He is currently working with artist Fabian Stoltz on "The Cities Beneath", the first part of which was exhibited at the Rathaus, Hamburg in November 2017. He is currently the creative director at Syenagiri, an animation & graphic novel production house.
