A NEW STORY OF THE BLACK DEATH

Monica Green, Professor of History at Arizona State University, specializes in medieval European medical history and the global history of infectious diseases.  In her talk she will show how our understanding of the Black Death, the plague pandemic that ravaged Europe, the Middle East, and north Africa between 1346 and 1353, has been transformed in the last decades because of new developments in genetics. Historians and archaeologists are now learning to incorporate the findings from genetics into new narratives, ones that show that this largest of pandemics was even larger, and more widespread, than we ever imagined before. Our story must now include not only the Mediterranean and Europe, but also China and perhaps even much of sub-Saharan Africa.