Monica Green

Monica H. Green specializes in the Global History of Health and Medieval European History, particularly the history of medicine and the history of gender. Her innovative teaching - including stints as guest faculty at the University of Utrecht (2007) and the University of Seattle (2013) - earned her the 2014 Hazen Education Prize from the History of Science Society. In the summer of 2009 and 2012, she directed the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Seminar for college and university teachers on "Health and Disease in the Middle Ages" at the Wellcome Library in London. In summer 2013, she was visiting fellow at the Center for Medieval Studies at Fordham University. In 2013-14, she was one of three ASU faculty who were selected as members of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

In spring 2015, she taught her course on the Black Death. It was out of concern how to teach the most severe pandemic in human history that she was prompted to engage in an extended interdisciplinary dialogue among researchers working on plague. That work came to fruition in the inaugural volume of a new journal, The Medieval Globe. Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death gathers together historians, anthropologists, and biologists to explore how the new sciences of plague, particularly genetics, can combine with humanistic approaches to create a new understanding of this globally distributed disease. (And yes, we have it here in Arizona!) Funding for the open-access publication of the volume was made possible by a generous grant from the World History Center of the University of Pittsburgh. The volume was the focus of an interdisciplinary symposium held at the University of Illinois on 29 Jan. 2015: The Black Death and Beyond: New Research at the Intersection of Science and the Humanities. And one of the essays, which corrects the "misdiagnosis" of an image thought to represent plague (it actually shows leprosy), has been written up as an example of digital scholarship on Wikipedia and has already effected a change in uses of the image on the Internet. Green has also published recently on plague's history in Lancet Infectious Diseases, and spoke on the topic again at a symposium at Rutgers University, Commerce and Contagion: Vectors Through Time and Space on 4 February 2015.