Update February 2023: Please note that Amelia Bonea has stepped down as MEDEP Project Leader in January 2023 due to a change in institutional affiliation from the University of Heidelberg to the University of Manchester and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research’s decision to revoke the German side of the project.
Amelia Bonea is a historian of South Asia and the British Empire, with an interest in media, science, technology and medicine. Her first monograph, The News of Empire: Telegraphy, Journalism, and the Politics of Reporting in Colonial India, c. 1830-1900 (Oxford University Press, 2016), was awarded the 2017 Eugenia M. Palmegiano Prize for the History of Journalism by the American Historical Association. Her most recent project, funded by the German Research Council, has investigated natural history heritage and the global entanglements of paleontology in twentieth-century India. Currently a Research Fellow at the University of Heidelberg, she will be joining the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Manchester in January 2023.
As part of MEDEP, Amelia and her team will examine the biomediatization of the 1957-58 influenza pandemic, the swine flu outbreaks of 2009 and 2015 and the Covid-19 pandemic in India in order to understand how scientists, media institutions and professionals tackled these crises and how they navigated issues of scientific uncertainty, medical accountability and public trust in state institutions. It is envisaged that this inquiry will also provide insights into how strategies of science communication have been shaped both by local imperatives and visions of mass communication promoted by UNESCO and WHO.
Media and Epidemics (MEDEP) 