Article Summary by Fran Pheasant-Kelly

Covid-19 affected, and continues to affect us all to some degree. For those who were around in the 1980s, there are aspects of the virus that chillingly recall the initial terrors of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Such connections are evident in news media coverage of Covid-19 – this article examines those links, as well as connections between Covid and other major international traumas, including 9/11 and World War Two, and viral outbreaks such as Ebola, SARS and MERS. It demonstrates how, rather than one crisis ‘replacing’ a previous one, we are repeatedly reminded of one trauma through another.

Read the full article on the Medial Humanities journal website.

Fran Pheasant-Kelly is a Reader in Film and Screen at Wolverhampton University, UK. Her research centres on abject spaces, fantasy, and the medical humanities. She has around eighty publications, including two monographs, Abject Spaces in American Cinema (2013) and Fantasy Film Post 9/11 (2013) and is the co-editor of Spaces of the Cinematic Home (2015) and Tim Burton’s Bodies (2021). She is currently working on several monographs including A History of HIV/AIDS in Film, Television and the Media (2024) and The Revenant: Towards a Sensory Cinema (2024), and a coedited collection, Action Heroines in the Twenty-First Century: Sisters in Arms (2024).