Please join us for the following special event, a collaboration between Medieval Studies and the Early Modern Workshop: 

October 15 | 4-5pm on Zoom | Discussion of Nَükhet Varlik's Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347-1600 (Cambridge UP 2015). 

We're delighted to announce that Nükhet Varlik (Associate Professor, History, University of South Carolina and Rutgers University-Newark) will be joining us virtually as well. Dr. Varlık is Associate Professor of History at the University of South Carolina and Rutgers University–Newark. She is a historian of the Ottoman Empire interested in disease, medicine, and public health. She is the author of Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347–1600 (2015) and editor of Plague and Contagion in the Islamic Mediterranean (2017). Her new book project, “Empire, Ecology, and Plague: Rethinking the Second Pandemic (ca.1340s-ca.1940s),” examines the six-hundred-year Ottoman plague experience in a global ecological context. In conjunction with this research, she is involved in developing the Black Death Digital Archive and contributing to multidisciplinary research projects that incorporate perspectives from palaeogenetics (ancient DNA research in particular), bioarchaeology, disease ecology, and climate science into historical inquiry. She is the Editor of the Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association (JOTSA).

For those interested in joining the discussion, please contact the Director of Medieval Studies, Deborah McGrady (dlm4z) for a copy of the book and for details about the zoom meeting. 

This event is a collaboration between the Medieval Studies Program and the Early Modern Workshop. Thanks to the generous support of New Literary History, the Medieval Studies Program is able to purchase 15 copies of Nükhet Varlik's book that will be distributed on a first-come, first-serve basis to individuals interested in joining the group for the designated discussion hour. Those to be invited range from undergraduate Medieval Studies majors and minors, Medieval Studies affiliated graduate students and faculty, and “friends” of Medieval Studies. Every effort will be made to balance distribution of copies of the books among these groups, but we will also assure that an electronic copy of the book, when possible, or at least a pdf copy of the representative chapter is made available to everyone. If you would like to participate in this reading group, please contact incoming Medieval Studies director Deborah McGrady (dlm4z@virginia.edu).

For more information about other upcoming Medieval Studies events, please visit the Medieval Studies Program website.