History of Death and Disease in the Islamicate World
Please set your timezone at https://www.chstm.org/user
Consortium Respectful Behavior Policy
Participants at Consortium activities will treat each other with respect and consideration to create a collegial, inclusive, and professional environment that is free from any form of discrimination, harassment, or retaliation.
Participants will avoid any inappropriate actions or statements based on individual characteristics such as age, race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, marital status, nationality, political affiliation, ability status, educational background, or any other characteristic protected by law. Disruptive or harassing behavior of any kind will not be tolerated. Harassment includes but is not limited to inappropriate or intimidating behavior and language, unwelcome jokes or comments, unwanted touching or attention, offensive images, photography without permission, and stalking.
Participants may send reports or concerns about violations of this policy to conduct@chstm.org.
Upcoming Meetings
There are no currently scheduled upcoming events.
Past Meetings
-
October 5, 2021
In this session, Nukhet Varlik and Ece Turnator will introduce the Black Death Digital Archive, a new resource of interest to the members of the HIDIW working group. "The Black Death Digital Archive (BDDA) is a multidisciplinary portal for researching the Second Plague Pandemic, i.e., outbreaks of plague that started with the mid-fourteenth-century Black Death and their recurrences across Afro-Eurasia the 13th century to the 19th"
-
September 7, 2021
"What’s in a Name?: Selfhood in Physicians’ Reports covering Ottoman Iraq"
Hande Yalnızoğlu
This presentation will focus on the reports of William H. Colvill, physician at the British Embassy in Baghdad, on the plague outbreak in Ottoman Iraq, close to the town of Karbala, in 1867. Searching for the native voice in his texts in order to uncover the intricacies of translating and establishing medical knowledge on plague, it ends up seeking to answer a very simple question: why did Colvill record the cases he was told about with their full names?
-
June 1, 2021
In this session, our presenter Mustakim Arıcı will discuss his recent publication, “Silent Sources of the History of Epidemics in the Islamic World: Literature of Ṭā’ūn/Plague Treatises.”
-
May 4, 2021
Cholera and Plague in Early Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Baghdad and Basra (Isacar Bolaños)
Isacar Bolaños will discuss some of the main primary sources (especially local histories of Baghdad and Basra along with some archival documents) for the study of cholera and plague in Ottoman Baghdad and Basra during the nineteenth century.
-
April 6, 2021
Justin Stearns
Justin Stearns will share his research on the plague treatises of Idrīs al-Bidlīsī and al-Baylūni on the basis of his publication “Public Health, the State, and Religious Scholarship Sovereignty in Idrīs al-Bidlīsī’s Arguments for Fleeing the Plague”.
-
March 2, 2021
Nahyan Fancy and Matthew Melvin-Koushki
Nahyan Fancy’s presentation will go over a selection of the primary sources
for two forthcoming pieces (one co-authored with Monica Green) that provide
evidence for plague in the mid-thirteenth century in the Levant and Egypt.Matthew Melvin-Koushki’s presentation will discuss his recent publication
“Taşkoprīzāde on the (Occult) Science of Plague Prevention and Cure”.
-
February 2, 2021
Reading List
- A. Arbaji, S. Kharabsheh, S. Al-Azab, M. Al-Kayed, Z. S. Amr, M. Abu Baker, and M. C. Chu, “A 12-case Outbreak of Pharyngeal Plague Following the Consumption of Camel Meat, in North–Eastern Jordan,” Annals of Tropical Medicine & Parasitology 99, no. 8 (2005), 789–793.
- Michael Dols, The Black Death in the Middle East (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).
- Monica H. Green, “Plague (Yersinia pestis),” Encyclopedia of the History of Science, general ed. Christopher J. Phillips (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Libraries Publishing Service), forthcoming.
- Monica H. Green, “The Four Black Deaths,” American Historical Review 125, no. 5 (December 2020), 1600-1631.
- Nükhet Varlık, “The Plague that Never Left: Restoring the Second Pandemic to Ottoman and Turkish History in the Time of COVID-19,” New Perspectives on Turkey 63 (2020), 176-89.
Here are Monica Green's slides from the meeting.
- « first
- ‹ previous
- 1
- 2
- 3
Group Conveners
-
Tunahan Durmaz
Tunahan Durmaz is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the European University Institute, Florence. His research mainly focuses on Ottoman and European histories (15th to 18th centuries) with a special interest in social and cultural aspects of communicable diseases. Durmaz comes from a diverse background of humanities encompassing not only history but also history of art and architecture. He earned his BA (with honors) in History and Architecture (minor) in Middle East Technical University in June 2016, and his master’s degree in Sabancı University with a thesis titled “Family, Companions, and Death: Seyyid Hasan Nûrî Efendi’s Microcosm (1661-1665).”
-
Nukhet Varlik
Nükhet Varlık is Associate Professor of History at 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 experiencein 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.