Each spring semester, USF's undergraduate Museum Studies class collaborates to organize an exhibition in the Donohue Rare Book Room in Gleeson Library. In March 2020, we were heading into the halfway point of the project, featuring artists' books of California landscape imagery, when the shelter-in-place order was issued for the San Francisco Bay Area. Faculty rushed to transition to teaching online, while students hurriedly packed up their dorm rooms and apartments and moved back home. As we all struggled to process the rapid onslaught of COVID-19 news amid widespread feelings of uncertainty and anxiety, we did our best to adapt in the face of various personal, logistical, and technical challenges.

With the original exhibition project comprising the vast majority of the coursework planned for the second half of the semester, I scrambled to re-envision the class, quickly adopting a virtual exhibition format. I hoped that, as budding art historians, researching historical pandemics and their related visual and material culture might help the class to process and contextualize what was routinely being described as a series of "unprecedented" events. I also hoped that the project might provide some reassurance that society had indeed overcome similar challenges in the past.

The students were tasked with finding open-source images in museum and library collection databases, researching past pandemics, and thinking about how these historical examples might help us to understand our current circumstances. Our research revealed that, in fact, there were plenty of precedents for the events we were experiencing, challenging the widespread use of the term "unprecedented." The selection of noteworthy epidemics and related images highlighted here are those that the class found especially compelling. We hope this exhibition helps others to learn from the past as we process and adjust to our "new normal."

~Professor Karen Fraser