A talk and discussion with Merle Eisenberg, National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC), Annapolis MD, and Lee Mordechai, Hebrew University (History Department), Jerusalem, Israel.
Moderators: Professor Eric A. Ivison and Adjunct Assistant Professor Joseph Frusci
About this Talk: The Justinianic Plague (c. 541-750 CE) is often depicted in scholarly and public literature as a major transformative event in Eurasian history with detrimental effects on politics, the economy, and culture from sub-Saharan Africa to England and the Middle East. This talk situates this pandemic in its historical context to demonstrate that its effects could be significant in the short-term, but its long-term effects appear dubious. Instead, we argue that pandemics in the ancient and medieval past have been made into spectacularly unusual events in the 20th-21st centuries to demonstrate modern superiority. At the end, we suggest that our own ongoing COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates we still experience many of the same problems.
