As a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Professor L.M. Bogad has created “The Plague,” a podcast series that not only explores the pandemic but also our nation’s homemade plagues created by human socioeconomic systems.

Broadcast on Apple Podcasts, the weekly series features Bogad exploring various topics with a diverse range of well-known scholars, activists and artists including Annie Sprinkle, Dr. Rupa Marya, Professor Julian E. Zelizer (Princeton University, CNN commentator), Professor Philip N. Howard (Oxford University), and Stephen Duncombe of the Center for Artistic Activism.  

Bogad poses that “the coronavirus infects the human body, but what illnesses in our body politic make us more vulnerable to it? Economic inequality? Environmental devastation? Labor precarity? Alienation? We pick a different societal plague each week and talk with an expert about how that plague makes the coronavirus deadlier.”

“We then move on to discuss ‘treatments’ or even ‘cures’ for that plague: what kinds of political or cultural action we can take to ‘cure’ it. Since many of our guest experts are also artists, they are invited to share a creative work on the topic—a song, poem, monologue—of their own creation or choosing.”