Being Human During COVID is now available on Fulcrum, a “community-developed, open-source platform for digital scholarship developed by Michigan Publishing and the U-M Library.”
The book emerged from conversations at the Humanities Collaboratory in the wake of the Covid-19 onset as a way for humanities scholars from many disciplines across U-M to contend with the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic.
Edited by Collaboratory Faculty Coordinator Kristin Hass, the volume documents the first year of the pandemic in real time, bringing together over 30 humanities scholars, archivists, and artists from the University of Michigan to address what it feels like to be human during the COVID-19 crisis.
The contributors in this collection draw on scholarly expertise and lived experience to try to make sense of the unfamiliar present in works that range from traditional scholarly essays, to personal essays, to visual art projects.
According to Hass, “we are going to be recovering from and thinking about and studying the year 2020 for a very long time to come. There simply weren’t enough days in 2021 for us to recover. And that is why Being Human during COVID is such a great read. It takes you on a vivid and deep dive into a particular fraught and intense historical moment and its contributors draw on a remarkably wide range of expertise to reflect on that moment, its precedents, and its future.”
A print edition will follow later this month.