EP #225 - 02.22.2021 - The History of Plague: New Perspectives

Today is a discussion of partnership w/the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest of Villanova University, "The History of Plague - New Perspectives" with Monica Green and Tunahan Dumaz.

Monica H. Green is an independent scholar specializing on the history of medicine in the Middle Ages. Although trained as a Europeanist, she has long recognized the intimate ties between Europe and the Islamic world, both of which suffered from the devastations of plague both in the early Middle Ages and again at the end of the medieval period. That work led her to explore the significance of new findings from genetics, which tells a story of plague's effects well beyond the confines of Europe. She is currently working on two books: a history of the medical translations of the 11th-century monk, Constantine the African; and The Black Death: A Global History, which looks at the spread of plague throughout Eurasia and Africa.

Tunahan Durmaz is a first-year Ph.D. researcher in the Department of History and Civilization at the European University Institute, Florence. His research mainly focuses on Ottoman history with a special interest in social and cultural aspects of diseases. He specifically studies how urban communities of the Ottoman Empire, and the world around them, perceived the concept of disease in the seventeenth century and if/how their perceptions changed over time. Durmaz earned his M.A. degree at Sabanci University (Istanbul) in 2019 with his thesis titled “Family, Companions, and Death: Seyyid Hasan Nûrî Efendi’s Microcosm (1661-1665)”.