Epidemic Belfast

In my class “Great Cities: Belfast,” taught in Spring 2022 at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas, United States, my students listened to 8 different podcast episodes after listening to multiple lectures on the social and economic history of 19^th century industrial Belfast. In pairs, they prepared presentations on their respective podcast episode topics and shared them with me and the class. The Epidemic Belfast Podcast was an invaluable resource for my students as they were able to learn a part of urban and economic history of which they had no prior knowledge. Additionally, many students drew connections between what they learned in the podcasts in terms of vaccinations, quarantines, and other public health measures to their own lived experiences as students during the COVID-19 Epidemic. Later in the semester, students listened to the episodes on polio and thalidomide. Hearing the actual voices of survivors made this history more real and more moving than any reading I could have assigned. I 100% will use Epidemic Belfast in my future classes and its creators and contributors should be congratulated for making such a resource available to researchers and educators around the world.