Fashioning a Varied Career in History after UNC: Environmental History, UNC Honors, and Doing History for Public Audiences
Discussion “Fashioning a Varied Career in History after UNC: Environmental History, UNC Honors, and Doing History for Public Audiences”
Friday, March 31 |11:20-12:30 am
Pauli Murray Hall 270
UNC – Chapel Hill
Professor Samuel Dolbee teaches at Vanderbilt University in the History Department and the Climate Studies Program. His new book analyzes borders and state formation by following locusts and revealing how they shaped both the environment and people’s imaginations from the late Ottoman Empire to the Second World War. He traces the movements of locusts and their intimate relationship to people in motion, including Arab and Kurdish nomads, Armenian deportees, and Assyrian refugees, as well as states of the region. His new book is an environmental history of microbes in the late Ottoman Empire, focusing on new treatments and spatial controls established against ailments like phylloxera, rabies, and rinderpest—which devastated the empire’s grape vines, street dogs, and cattle—as well as the way the language of germs infected the language of politics in the empire’s final years.
Sponsored by the UNC First Year Seminar Program, the Honors Program, the History Department, and the North Carolina Consortium for Middle East Studies.
