Penn Pandemic Diary Penn Pandemic Diary, Entry #19: All Changed, Changed Utterly

April 30, 2020
By Conor Donnan | Penn Pandemic Diary

Conor Donnan is a doctoral student in the History Department at the University of Pennsylvania under the supervision of Professor Walter Licht. He received his B.A. in History from Ulster University in Ireland. Donnan’s current research focuses on labor, capitalism, and immigration in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America.

On March 11, I sat at lunch with my fiancée and our dog joking about my dissertation chapters and her upcoming residency match for medical school. “Our life is so uncertain,” I said.

I had no conception of what the next days had in store. We were both preparing for new careers and our late May wedding, and the reaction to COVID-19 pandemic was just beginning to pick up. I picked up my phone and saw a message from Penn’s international office that changed my joking mood instantly.

As I scrolled down the email carefully, I read the dreaded line, “international students are expected to return home.” I have been an international student in the United States for six years, but this was one of those moments when I realized the fragility of my status in America. “Surely they don’t mean me. My research is in Montana and Oklahoma. Why would I have to go back to Ireland?” I wondered. After a moment of panic, I eventually got word from the university that I was not getting deported.

The next few weeks brought more drastic change in all aspects of my life. My fiancée and I moved to Maryland for her residency, but the state was quickly placed on lockdown. Our wedding was scheduled for May in my home country, Ireland, but we were forced to delay due to the pandemic. Our families and friends, who were scheduled to travel to Dublin for the wedding, rearranged flights and hotels. To make matters worse, my mother, unemployed and suffering from depression, is stuck in Ireland alone while I live in the United States. We cannot check on her in person, due to the distance, but we make sure that supplies are constantly sent to her house.

The pandemic is also a stark reminder of the political issues in my home. Northern Ireland is technically a British territory, but the Republic of Ireland is an independent nation. The Irish government did a fantastic job of reacting to the outbreak, but the British government proved woefully inadequate. My mother lives in Belfast in an Irish community, but its falls under British jurisdiction. Many of the British unionists in Northern Ireland wanted to follow the example set by Westminster, but that could have been a public health disaster. This disagreement caused controversy in the North and South of Ireland because a pandemic like COVID-19 requires a consistent all-island approach.

Between March 11 and April 11, all my plans for the year changed completely. Tension was mounting in Ireland, my move to Maryland was undercut by pandemic restrictions, my wedding was delayed, and my status as an immigrant in America seemed more tenuous than ever.

Yet, as a doctoral candidate who studies the history of labor, immigration, and capitalism, I find myself fascinated by the reactions to the pandemic. We often try to teach undergraduates that events like World War II or the establishment of the American Empire were not inevitable, and people did not often understand the monumental shifts occurring within their society around those landmark moments. People assume that the distant past was unavoidable, but the pandemic shows that historical time is not linear and extraordinary events can arise on ordinary days.

We find a sense of friability to everyday life during the pandemic, and we are closer to the distant past than we think. Politicians have been using wartime dialogue, the market is on a roller coaster, and the world is unprepared for a functional pandemic response. Writing poetry has been revitalized, but modern modes of expression such as memes and livestreaming also portray the uniqueness of the cultural moment.

Such a moment will change how young scholars think about the profession of History. People will ask questions about how active we should be in helping record the historical moment and if we should be trying to digitize archives more rapidly due to travel issues. I foresee the history of public health and the mundane becoming popular subjects because young historians will have firsthand experience. We will find astonishing new historical tales to tell, our historians may become more active in politics and public health, and people may treat each other, and other nations differently based on their pandemic experiences. I hope that this trying time emboldens people to solve issues relating to modern capitalism, the healthcare system, the global order, and community life.

One month into sheltering at home, I have just finished another lunch with my fiancée. I am writing the next chapter of my dissertation about anti-colonialism and Irish nationalism; I decided to write this diary entry during a break from research on Native American reactions to the Easter Rising of 1916 in Ireland. While writing, I am reminded of the words of William Butler Yeats in his poem, “Easter, 1916.” Upon reflecting on the rapid change that the Easter Rising had on Ireland, Yeats wrote “All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.” I think his words hold true today.

The views expressed in the Penn Pandemic Diary are solely the author’s and not those of Penn or Perry World House.