The COVID-19 global pandemic has highlighted the roles that collective wisdom and action have played in battles against epidemics throughout history. This new book, entitled Reflections on COVID-19, features 19 articles by 20 scholars from Academia Sinica’s humanities and social science institutes/research centers who took part in the “Humanities and Social Science Perspectives on COVID-19 Rapid-Response Grants” project to undertake an interdisciplinary study of the pandemic and related issues.

The driving forces behind this volume are co-editors Paul R. Katz (Distinguished Research Fellow, Institute of Modern History) and Chen Hsi-yuan (Research Fellow, Institute of History & Philology; Director, Academia Sinica Center for Digital Cultures). Together, they led project members in using their expertise to critique current events and reflect on lessons from the past. Reflections on COVID-19 is a collaborative effort, spanning a thousand years of history and scaling outward from Taiwan to Asia and the entire world. In the face of today’s rapidly changing pandemic, this work can hopefully serve as a stepping-stone to further research on a wide range of unexplored areas.