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In the Spotlight
Faculty Spotlight
Katherine Foss experienced 2020 as the professor who wrote the book on American epidemics and attained major media exposure
story by Allison Gorman and photos by J. Intintoli
Early in 2020, as it was dawning on Americans that their lives were about to change in some drastic but unknowable way, MTSU’s Katherine Foss got a phone call from The New York Times. Thus began the steady influx of requests from newspapers, magazines, broadcasters, and podcasters wanting to talk to the woman who wrote the book on epidemics in the United States.
Foss, a professor in the School of Journalism and Strategic Media, couldn’t answer the nation’s pressing epidemiological questions, like how this mysterious new virus spread or who was most vulnerable. But she could offer perspective— from comforting to cautionary—on our past public health crises and the narratives that shaped our responses to them.
Her book Constructing the Outbreak: Epidemics in Media and Collective Memory, published in September 2020, revisits scenes from seven inflection points in our country’s public health history—from 1721 in smallpox-ravaged Boston, where authorities debated whether to try inoculation, suggested by an enslaved man who had been inoculated in his native Africa; to turn-ofthe-century New York City, where Irish immigrant “Typhoid” Mary Mallon was the victim of forced isolation and demonization; to 1952 in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, where overflowing polio wards reflected a terrifying virus at its peak, even as Dr. Jonas Salk was on the verge of a vaccine.
Back in 2016, when Foss decided to write the book, she couldn’t have anticipated that its publication would align with the deadliest epidemic America had seen in more than a century. She says her sudden popularity with the media during the COVID-19 outbreak was “a curiosity.”
So was living through the kind of event she’d just finished writing about.
Crises and Controversies
Since joining the MTSU faculty in 2008, Foss has carved out a scholarly niche at the intersection of media and medicine in the United States.
Author of three books and editor of three more, she has written extensively about how news and entertainment media shape Americans’ understanding of public health issues and how they serve as “gatekeepers” who frame our collective memory of epidemics and similar crises.
When COVID-19 turned into an American public health crisis, Foss was as blindsided as the rest of us, but she saw the controversies coming.
In early January 2020, as worrisome reports about the virus were just making landfall here, Foss’ teaching assistant mentioned that she was trying to find masks to send to her family in China.
“I casually remarked that I just couldn’t imagine that Americans would ever be willing to wear masks—that individualism would prohibit such collective action,” Foss blogged later. “I had no idea that we were on the cusp of a global pandemic.”
In early February, Foss penned an opinion piece for The Tennessean reminding readers that the flu posed a greater public health hazard. The piece “became outdated almost immediately,” she said.
But it was also prescient. In the op-ed, Foss warned that “misinformation has distorted and impaired flu vaccination efforts” and that a “lapse in the collective memory of infectious disease feeds anti-vaccination rhetoric that undermines public health efforts to curb transmission.”
In other words, time and first-world privilege had eroded Americans’ reasonable fear of contagious illnesses. More than a hundred years after the 1918 influenza outbreak killed 675,000 of us, we had forgotten what it was like to have family and friends felled by a virus in devastating numbers.
Historical Parallels
It was extreme politicization of a public health crisis in the United States—a situation as novel as the virus itself— that sparked that February phone call from the Times. But the many interviews that followed generally focused on historical comparisons, as people looked to the past to make sense of a bewildering present.
The media’s preferred touchpoint was the “Spanish flu” in 1918, which took nearly six times more American lives than World War I in less than half the time. Yet in our collective memory, Foss says, it was eventually reduced to “a footnote” of the war.
Foss was suddenly on the receiving end of such questions as “How did Americans celebrate Halloween in 1918?” (Most cities banned or scaled back celebrations, she told History.com— although it was more of an adult holiday then.)
She also tried to correct misinformation about that pandemic. Foss found little evidence to support the narrative that there were a significant number of “antimaskers” in 1918, although wearing masks to prevent the spread of infection was a new concept then. And she was frustrated by frequent parallels drawn between “waves” of influenza then and COVID-19, because a century ago Americans didn’t have timely information to adjust their behavior to an emerging outbreak.
She thinks a closer comparison is polio: In the early to mid-20th century, as with COVID-19 in its early stages, no one understood how polio spread or who might succumb to it. Most infected people felt fine or had mild symptoms; others were paralyzed or died.
In 1937, a late-summer surge in polio, which notoriously struck young children, led Chicago Public Schools to develop “radio school,” the original remote learning. Foss wrote about that pioneering moment for The Conversation online news outlet.
During COVID-19, Foss published many epidemic-themed articles in popular media, from Smithsonian Magazine to The Washington Post. But the remote-learning piece really struck a chord.
As COVID-19 upended a second academic year, the virus was making the logistics of family life nearly impossible, especially for working mothers. And parents of school-age children were tearing their hair out trying to keep them engaged academically. F
oss, who has two children, was right there too.
Hands-On Research
The same week in March 2020 that MTSU shifted classes online and public schools shut down, Foss received the final proofs for Constructing the Outbreak. While figuring out how to teach and parent in totally new ways, she also had to work COVID-19 into her completed book so it wouldn’t be obsolete before publication.
It probably benefited that she didn’t have the freedom to make big changes, she says.
“Even speculating wouldn’t have worked . . . because optimistic me, I couldn’t fathom how long the crisis would go on. Part of this was just a way of coping, just thinking, ‘Things will get better.’ ”
Like so many of us, she slogged through. Making weird pandemic purchases. (“Drowning in stress,” she bought a rubber boat so her daughters could paddle around their rain-flooded backyard.) Going to heroic lengths to make homeschool fun. (“My kids were not amused when I woke them up dressed like Maria von Trapp on Sound of Music day.”)
And eventually things did get better—including book sales. Not that selling books has ever been her motivation for writing them as an academic. Nevertheless, Constructing the Outbreak has been doing brisk business on Amazon.
Foss really hasn’t been paying attention, though; she’s planning her next book. The pandemic isn’t over, but Foss says there’s no time to waste. If they’re not contained, memories mutate. She can’t let that happen. MTSU
