Archival Research on the Visual History of the Third Plague Pandemic in San Francisco, California and Honolulu, Hawaii. (360G-Wellcome-105494_Z_14_Z)

With this application I am seeking funding to conduct a research trip to various archives in San Francisco and Honolulu. The overall purpose of the trip is to gather visual material on Bubonic Plague outbreaks that hit the cities in 1899 and 1900. Research will be conducted as part of an ongoing project on the Visual Representation of the Third Plague Pandemic, based at CRASSH, University of Cambridge, funded by the European Research Council and led by Dr. Christos Lynteris. This application wil l support the particular analysis of the pandemic's arrival in the USA. In Honolulu and San Francisco, the onset of the plague was met with drastic measures against the Chinese populations of both cities, both refueling the long-standing animosity towards th Chinese immigrants while inventing and establishing cornerstones of the US public health. Photographs, maps and illustrations did not simply record the enfolding events but structured the way of percieving threat as much as anti-plague measu res were constituted through visual framings. A comprehensive survey of the available sources and their inclusion into the project's global open access database will lay ground for further research and will allow for new perspectives on epidemics of the past and present.