MONICA H. GREEN

Independent Scholar and Suppes Visiting Professor of the History of Science, Stanford University (Winter 2022)

Abstract: 

The question has been increasing been put on the table of how deep historical concepts of “race” can be traced in different cultural traditions. And in the context of the present pandemic, the ways medicine and public health are implicated in racist structures of their societies are necessarily urgent. But if “race” is a social construction, then presumably we should not expect that it functions the same way in all historical contexts—or even that it has any particular social force at all in comparison to other ways of structuring societies and shaping daily life. This talk will address some episodes in the history of infectious diseases in the premodern period and ask whether “race” seems to be useful as an analytical concept. Most of the work presented comes from documentary history and narratives deriving from the evolutionary histories of pathogens themselves. But we will also discuss how archaeological approaches to disease history might contribute to these questions.

The speaker suggest the audience to read the following article before the lecture : http://www.themedievalacademyblog.org/epidemiology-101-for-medievalists-or-why-narratives-matter-in-historicizing-hate-speech/.