SCI Visiting Researcher: Professor Monica Green

Professor Monica Green will be visiting Exeter University this June, giving a public lecture and leading two seminars. We invite everyone interested in pandemics and disease, past, present and future, in the history of the Black Death, and in the wider challenges, opportunities and necessities of undertaking interdisciplinary research involving sciences and humanities to come to these events and contribute to the discussions.

Tickets to all events can be acquired from this page.

Public Lecture: ‘How Genetics Has Changed the History of Pandemics, And How History Is Changing Genetics’

13:00-14:30, Monday 16 June Lecture Theatre B, Streatham Court (Hybrid)

In the past three decades, the field of genetics has developed methods to extract the history of various organisms out of their genomes. These methods have been increasingly applied to the pathogens involved in the world’s pandemics. Comparing the histories that have emerged of plague and other diseases, this talk will ask how dialogue between genetics and history shaped these new narratives, and how that dialogue might be expanded in the future by studying other infectious disease outbreaks?

Masterclass: ‘Towards a global history of the Black Death’

10.30-12:00, Tuesday 17 June, 10:30-12, Margaret Room 1, Queen's

Pandemics are global events, experienced locally, and often written about regionally. How can we use genetic data, for example, and often overlooked sources to move beyond Europe and generate the kinds of joined up and global history that these complex phenomena deserve? What is currently known of the origins and transmission of the zoonotic disease of plague leading up to the disease’s explosive proliferation in the mid-fourteenth century. How can we expand the story further?

Workshop: (Palaeo-)Genetics for the Humanities and Social Sciences

11:00-12:30, Wednesday 18 June, Margaret Room 1, Queen's

For ECRs, PGRs and colleagues who want to get acquainted with recent palaeogenetic material, approaches and resources in the field of disease, and engage with wider debates about how genetics and the humanities could and should come together in answering important research questions.

Co-ordinated by: Professor Rebecca Flemming (Director Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health). Contact: r.flemming@exeter.ac.uk

Bio

Monica Green is an eminent medievalist at the forefront of the crucial endeavour to integrate findings from the new discipline of palaeogenetics—especially ancient genetic material relating to disease causing micro-organisms—into the writing of history in a methodologically rigorous and exciting way. She has striven to get the most out of the new scientific insights by melding them with other sources, literary and material, which themselves require reinterrogation as part of this dialogue. This humanistic evidence, also needs to feedback into the scientific agenda, in answers to key questions about meaning and interpretation, about plausible historical stories of origins and spread. Monica’s work has focused on the bubonic plague—since Y. pestis is the pathogen which has received most of the palaeogenetic attention so far—but she has also worked on the histories of several other globally disseminated infectious diseases, and the methodological enterprise she is engaged in has wider relevance still, is an absolutely vital one in today’s interdisciplinary world.