Editor’s Note: Starting today and running periodically over the next month, Points will feature interviews with authors from the latest issue of ADHS’s journal Social History of Alcohol and Drugs (vol. 34, no. 2; Fall 2020), published by the University of Chicago Press. Today’s post by Dr. Nancy Campbell reflects on both her keynote address at the 2019 ADHS biennial conference in Shanghai and on learning how to promote a book during the early days of a global pandemic. Dr. Campbell is Professor & Department Head, Science and Technology Studies, at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. You can see her keynote address here. Contact the University of Chicago Press to subscribe to the journal or to request access to this article or any other article from SHAD.
Delivered steps from Shanghai University, my 2019 ADHS keynote address in the Fall 2020 issue of SHAD foreshadowed my latest book OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose (The MIT Press). The David F. Musto Center for Drugs and National Security Studies was the event’s host organization, and the SHAD editorial trio (editor’s note: Nancy Campbell, David Herzberg, and Lucas Richert) was in town for the first ADHS conference held in Asia, “Changing Minds: Societies, States, the Science, and Psychoactive Substances in History.” Thus my memories are bound up with an evening at Healer in Shanghai, where Phoebe Han mixes ritual, baijiu aged within live bamboo, creativity, and incense into exquisite concoctions (pictured). Even reading the page proofs of the keynote brought that moment of contemplative refreshment back to me like Proust’s imagined petit madeleines dunked in tea.
The keynote address condensed the book, which came out on March 5, 2020—right before institutions shut down in the face of COVID-19. Fumbling around Zoom and jerry-rigging cables to ease home WiFi traffic while pivoting my class “Drugs in History” online, I leaned into co-editing SHAD, heading a department, and maintaining a brisk writing and walking schedule with COVID buddy Marion Roach Smith. I learned more about promoting books than I ever wanted to know in the basement corner that became my pop-up studio. To up my audio game, I hid beneath a blanket to record, while coordinating my video outfits with a teal couch and russet walls.
Some of my favorite bartenders include grad students and PhD alums. They’ve had rough days “pivoting” to incorporate COVID-19 into their dissertations. I’d introduce my book as dense, dark, and handsome, like the cover. OD is spelled out in old-school Franklin Gothic Condensed type—headline type. But scribed through the letters is a 45-degree angle, signifying the US opioid overdose death rate from 2000-2017.