We are honored to welcome Monica Green as our Exchange host. She is a historian of medicine and Global Health, specializing in the history of medieval Europe. Monica has spent over forty years researching the intellectual and social aspects of premodern medicine and has won numerous fellowships and awards for her work. Over the last fifteen years, she has focused her research on understanding the history of the world’s major infectious diseases, including the Black Plague.
In her blogpost, How Long Will It (Did It) Last? Redefining the Black Death as the “Second Plague Pandemic, Green takes up an issue she has been researching since 2014. In the opening essay of the collection, Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death, she argued that new findings from genetics, as well as expansive investigations by historians working on regions outside of Europe, made clear that the Eurocentric focus of Black Death studies was leaving too much of the pandemic's history out of the picture. Since then, it has become even more apparent that the Black Death as experienced in western Eurasia reflected only part of the story. Her research suggests the Second Plague Pandemic had its origins in Mongol military campaigns of the thirteenth century, not the period of comparatively peaceful commerce of the mid-fourteenth century, which challenges the current Eurocentric narrative.
Her blog addresses how to tell a new story that alters our traditional chronological boundaries. It often takes time for a new narrative to become accepted but it’s essential to tell the complete narrative. As we examine and try to make sense of our own current situation with the COVID pandemic, it is important to turn to history, modern science, and public health research.
In this Exchange, Monica welcome’s questions about how to teach pandemic stories. She’s happy to talk about the evidence, whether genetic or documentary, that supports the “new paradigm” of plague studies that she and other researchers are now advancing.
The Exchange will be “Live” March 14 –16 but go ahead and start posting your questions for Monica Green in the comments below. You may want to ask about her studies of both historical and current pandemics. Have you encountered any challenges when teaching about the Black Death or other global pandemics? We’d also love to learn from you on strategies you use to examine the Black Death and comparisons you’ve made to the current pandemic How do your students respond? Let’s learn from each other!
If you’d like to additional resources, here are links to Monica Green’s published work.
(https://independentscholar.academia.edu/MonicaHGreen)
