Please join us for the 2018 Astor Lecture in Global Environmental History: ‘Climate and the Plague: Toward a Late Holocene Eurasian Synthesis’, followed by drinks.

The history of the bubonic plague – a central question in Eurasian environmental history for decades — has been fundamentally changed by new research in genetics and climate science. Traditionally thought to have been a new disease around the time of the Black Death, genetic analysis now has extended the origins of the plague back first to the Plague of Justinian and now deep into the prehistory of arid Central Asia. We now can suggest when and where the bubonic plague emerged, and how shifting climates drove its emergence and epidemic diffusion, entangled with patterns of steppe migrations and trade.