Plagued Legacies: Rethinking Black Death Narratives

This talk addresses the lasting legacies of past plagues, in particular the Black Death, because they continue to shape the way we think about new pandemics. We must recognize pandemics as long-term processes and shift our focus beyond epidemic episodes of disruption to better understand how past societies learned to live with diseases. The talk also highlights persistent problems related to pandemics, such as European exceptionalism, triumphalism, and epidemiological orientalism that are not only ubiquitous in the historical scholarship, but also staples of public opinion about pandemics, past and present. Speaker Nükhet Varlık, Associate Professor of History, Rutgers University–Newark