Nükhet Varlık

Research: The Second Plague Pandemic (13th-19th century) in the Ottoman Empire and Western Eurasia more broadly; historical epidemiology; interdisciplinary plague studies.

Nükhet Varlık is Associate Professor of History at the University of South Carolina and Rutgers University–Newark. She is a historian of the Ottoman Empire interested in disease, medicine, and public health. She is the author of Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347–1600 (2015) and editor of Plague and Contagion in the Islamic Mediterranean (2017). Her new book project, “Empire, Ecology, and Plague: Rethinking the Second Pandemic (ca.1340s-ca.1940s),” examines the six-hundred-year Ottoman plague experience in a global ecological context. In conjunction with this research, she is involved in developing the Black Death Digital Archive and contributing to multidisciplinary research projects that incorporate perspectives from palaeogenetics (ancient DNA research in particular), bioarchaeology, disease ecology, and climate science into historical inquiry. She is the Editor of the Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association (JOTSA).

For more information please see:

https://sc.edu/study/colleges_schools/artsandsciences/history/our_people/directory/nukhet.php

https://sasn.rutgers.edu/about-us/faculty-staff/nukhet-varlik

https://newark-rutgers.academia.edu/NUKHETVARLIK

Relevant publications include:

Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347-1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)

Plague and Contagion in the Islamic Mediterranean (Kalamazoo, MI: Arc Humanities Press, 2017)

'The plague that never left: restoring the Second Pandemic to Ottoman and Turkish history in the time of COVID-19,' New Perspectives on Turkey 63 (2020): 1-14, https://doi.org/10.1017/npt.2020.27

'Rethinking the History of Plague in the Time of COVID-19,' in Histories of Epidemics in the Time of COVID‐19, edited by Erica Charters & Koen Vermeir, Centaurus 62:2 (2020): 285–93 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1600-0498.12302

'How do pandemics end? History suggests diseases fade but are almost never truly gone', The Conversation, https://theconversation.com/how-do-pandemics-end-history-suggests-diseases-fade-but-are-almost-never-truly-gone-146066