A Georgetown University history professor received €10 million to study the spread of the plague in medieval Europe as part of a research team, the university announced Nov. 26.
Professor Timothy Newfield, a historical epidemiologist and environmental historian, is a principal investigator of EUROpest, an international and interdisciplinary research team. The European Research Council, a public funding body for scientific research in the European Union, awarded the team a Synergy Grant, which supports collaborative projects across different countries, over six years to study why the plague had a disparate toll on different areas and within cities.
Newfield said the team will use the funds to study plague in medieval Europe through an interdisciplinary approach combining history and science.
“We want to be able to understand historical outbreaks in sharper resolution than anyone has before,” Newfield told The Hoya. “We’ve identified roughly 50 outbreaks that we’re going to study in great detail, and we’re going to study those from a climate perspective, a genetic perspective and from a traditional historian’s archival perspective.”
Plague is a bacterial disease with high mortality rates that has caused pandemics throughout history, most famously the Black Death, the first outbreak of the second plague pandemic in 14th century Europe. The disease still kills numerous people each year, including a 2017 epidemic in Madagascar.
Newfield said historians and scientists have a limited understanding of how and why plague spreads, pointing out that common explanations, such as proliferation through rats, have little to no evidentiary support.
“We have no explanation for why plague didn’t spread universally or why its effects were so uneven, both temporally and geographically,” Newfield said. “When we think about it in the past as a universal killer, we’re misleading ourselves.”
Newfield said the COVID-19 pandemic, which highlighted healthcare inequalities, inspired the team’s research.
“We became aware of the fact that diseases don’t spread indiscriminately,” Newfield said. “We started reflecting back on unknowns in historical disease outbreaks. Historians are now alert to this idea that human beings — because of their biases, because of their privileges, because of unequal social economic standings and healthcare access — contribute to how outbreaks manifest.”
Newfield said the team will use the grant to fund genetic and historical research into why the plague affected various areas and groups differently.
“The ideal will be that we will be able to demonstrate how plague was transmitted in the past, and be able to tease out different mechanisms by which plague spread,” Newfield said. “After six years, we’re hoping to understand the drivers, the influences that caused plague to take the demographic toll that it did, to account for its unevenness.”
Samantha Huebner (CAS ’26), who took Newfield’s “Global History of the Plague” course in Spring 2024, said Newfield bridged science and history in a way that was accessible to the biology and history majors in the class.
“He did a really great job of getting everyone to understand the other discipline,” Huebner told The Hoya. “He’s an amazing teacher, super funny, super knowledgeable and knows a ton about the experts in the field.”
Rachel Singer (CAS ’21, GRD ’27) took multiple of Newfield’s courses as an undergraduate student and is now one of his PhD advisees; she said Newfield cares deeply about his students and is passionate about his research.
“I learned immediately that Tim is a really incredible mentor, especially to undergrads,” Singer told The Hoya. “He took time out of his schedule in the middle of a freaking pandemic to help me publish my term paper for that class in a real journal. I got a sense that my ideas actually mattered, and all of that is thanks to Tim — he takes even undergrads’ ideas really seriously.”
Newfield said the research requires a lot of support, both in funding and logistics, but added that he looks forward to working with his team.
“No one’s done this before because it requires so many feet on the ground, it requires new data, it requires the commitment of a large amount of funding, and that’s why we’re so grateful to the European Research Council,” Newfield said. “There’s no way this would have happened were I going alone — the work with the team has been pivotal.”
