How was social distance observed (if at all) during previous pandemics? Turns out there's quite a precedent not just for staying away for your neighbors, but also for the idea of "quaranteaming" you might have heard about.

CNN talked to Rebecca Messbarger, a professor of Italian and founding director of the Medical Humanities program at Washington University in St. Louis about social distancing from the Black Plague until now. The parts about the different ways people deal with distance still ring true.

Please join the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures in congratulating Professor Ignacio Infante on the publication of his new book, a groundbreaking translation of Vicente Huidobro’s Temblor del cielo, available now.

Giovanni Boccaccio’s masterpiece, the “Decameron,” is set on the outskirts of Florence in 1348. His protagonists have retreated to the countryside in the wake of the Black Death, which is decimating their city both mortally and socially. The book offers important lessons as we confront the global threat of Coronavirus.

When a plague swept 14th-century Florence, killing more than half the city’s population, wealthy Italians turned to social distancing. One small group’s retreat from a stricken city to a deserted villa became the backdrop for the classic novel “The Decameron.”

That novel is just one of the texts Rebecca Messbarger teaches in her Disease, Madness and Death Italian Style course at Washington University. But it has sudden resonance, she says — and relevance she never anticipated when she began teaching it a year ago.

Researchers and students engaging with the U.S.’s second-largest language are ignored in our universities — and in ‘The Chronicle’

Sitting down in his office lined with thousands of books and a new Keurig, Professor Ignacio Sánchez Prado, who teaches Mexican cinema, literature and culture at Washington University, divulged his life’s story, his work over the years which culminated in his appointment to the Kluge Chair at the Library of Congress.

In her course “Disease, Madness, and Death Italian Style,” Rebecca Messbarger, professor of ltalian and founding director of the Medical Humanities Program at Washington University, takes students through seven centuries of Italian culture, beginning with The Decameron and the plague of 1348.

‘American Dirt’ gets Mexico very wrong. It’s the latest in a long trend.

Interview with Faculty Fellow Akiko Tsuchiya

Please join us in congratulating Professor of French Harriet Stone on the publication of her new book, Crowning Glories: Netherlandish Realism and the French Imagination during the Reign of Louis XIV.

The Department of Romance Languages and Literatures congratulates Professor Ignacio Sánchez Prado on his recent installation as the Jarvis Thurston and Mona Van Duyn Professor in the Humanities.

Swashbuckling tales of valiant gauchos roaming Argentina and Uruguay were nineteenth-century bestsellers. But when these stories jumped from the page to the circus stage and beyond, their cultural, economic, and political influence revolutionized popular culture and daily life.