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Our Founding Historians Lecture 2023 took place on 1 November. This year's guest speaker was Sussex alumni, Professor David Arnold, the lecture is titled: Dr Hunter's Plague: Photography, Gender and Disease in Nineteenth-Century India.

In these pandemic times we inevitably look back to the experience of earlier disease episodes. But to whose history do we return and by what means can we envisage what happened? The brief Indian career of Dr Marion Hunter, one of many British doctors and nurses sent to western India during the 1896-1900 plague pandemic, offers unique insights into disease control in an imperial setting, the uses of photography and the ambiguities of race, place, caste and gender.

Emeritus Professor David Arnold was named so by the History department at the University of Warwick and is a Fellow of the British Academy. He was an undergraduate student at Sussex University (1968), continuing his studies and graduating as a doctoral student in 1973. David went on to teach at the University of Dar es Salaam before joining the History Department at the University of Lancaster in 1979. He was Professor of South Asian History at SOAS from 1988 to 2006, when he joined the University of Warwick.