Maxim Gakh

How does your research and scholarship influence your teaching and service and vice versa?
 
The COVID-19 pandemic is at the center of much of my research these days. I’ve been working with colleagues to examine state executive orders stemming from the pandemic. Legal interventions to manage COVID-19 served as the immediate and all-too-real backdrop for my Fall 2020 Public Health Law course: we explored public health legal preparedness and response; legal and ethical dilemmas involved in vaccine distribution; state government authority to regulate interstate travel to slow the spread; the contribution of systemic and structural racism to COVID-19 disparities; and the colossal social challenges in housing, food insecurity, and access to healthcare exacerbated by the pandemic.  

What have you read, listened to, or watched recently that has influenced you or your work?

I just read Severance by Ling Ma. The novel’s protagonist fights to survive in a post-apocalyptic world ravaged by a pandemic while making sense of her life before the pandemic began. Reading it now was unsettling yet cathartic. It was unsettling because some details about how the book’s pandemic spreads resemble COVID-19. It was cathartic because it provided a fictional world to help interpret our current reality.