{"word_count": 281, "character_count": 2026}
Session on Black Death at International Congress on Medieval Studies (Kalamazoo), May 11-14, 2017“Before and After 1348:  Prelude and Consequences of the Black Death,” organized by Monica Green, email: monica.green@asu.edu.Abstract:  The “new paradigm” of Black Death studies has adopted the findings of recent paleogenetics and evolutionary understandings of Yersinia pestis‘s late medieval genetic diversification to see the Black Death as a much broader epidemiological phenomenon than previously realized. Although Black Death narratives are usually told from the perspective of western Europe, it is in fact likely that much of Eurasia and North Africa was affected by the newly proliferating organism. And in many of those areas, we know now, plague “focalized,” becoming embedded in the local fauna and thus persisting for years, or even centuries, thereafter. This session invites work that looks both at the late medieval pandemic’s origins before 1348 (whether in China or other places in central Eurasia) and its after-effects, including the 1360-63 pestis secunda. Cultural as well as scientific approaches are welcome.Please send proposals directly to me: monica.green@asu.edu.  Paper proposals (a one-page abstract and a Participant Information Form) are due by September 15. The links to information on the submission process and the Participation Information Form may be found at http://www.wmich.edu/medievalcongress/submissions. For the statement on Congress rules, see: http://www.wmich.edu/medievalcongress/policies.You may wish to know that the newly created Contagions: Society for Historic Infectious Disease Studies will also be sponsoring two sessions, tentatively entitled “Historic Landscapes of Disease,” and “The Great Transition: Climate, Disease, and Society in the Late Medieval World: A Roundtable on Bruce Campbell’s New Book.” For info on those sessions, please contact Michelle Ziegler, zieglerm@slu.edu.&#160;More information on the American Association for the History of Medicine website