The Justinianic Plague

The sixth-century Justinianic plague, with a death toll of about 25 million, was supposedly one of the most catastrophic epidemics in the history of humankind. This Dataset Curation grant will support the development of a standardised, open-access repository of data on the plague which will serve as a reference resource for scholars, a useful tool for research on other plague occurrences in history, and a map-based interface for the broader public, particularly school children, teachers, and introductory university classes an easy. The project is part of Princeton’s interdisciplinary Climate Change & History Research Initiative which investigates the impact of climate change on the societies of the Mediterranean and the Eastern Eurasian steppe over two millennia of history.

The final project, renamed PLAGUE (Plague in Late Antiquity: Gathering the Uncertain Sources), can be found on the CCHRI website.

Merle Eisenberg is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center ( SESYNC). He received his PhD in Princeton’s History Department in 2018 and was a Lecturer and Postgraduate Research Associate in 2018-2019.