Kyle Harper
Professor of Classics and Letters and Provost Emeritus
The University of Oklahoma
"Health and History in a Time of Pandemic"
Thursday, February 11, 2021 at 7:00pm
Zoom Webinar
Free & Open to the Public | Registration Required
The control of infectious disease is supposed to be a hallmark of the modern world, and thus the COVID-19 pandemic not only feels like we are living through something historic, but that we are living in history. In this lecture, Professor Harper will emphasize why the history of health is a field requiring interdisciplinary work that joins the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, and explores the ways that some of the very tools that are helping us track the spread of the new coronavirus are also opening up the possibility of a deeper understanding of how human transformation of disease ecology has been a part of history for millennia.
"Kyle Harper has emerged as without doubt one of the most creative, engaging, and productive scholars currently working in the field of late antiquity. In two major publications (Slavery in the Late Roman World [2011] and From Shame to Sin [2013]) and through a series of punctiliously researched articles, he has added depth and color to our understanding of late antique social history, and of the differences Christianity did (and did not) make.."—The American Historical Review
Kyle Harper is Professor of Classics and Letters and Provost Emeritus at The University of Oklahoma. Dr. Harper is a historian of the ancient world whose work has spanned economic, environmental, and social history. He is the author of three books Slavery in the Late Roman World, AD 275-425 (2011), which was awarded the James Henry Breasted Prize by the American Historical Association and the Outstanding Publication Award from the Classical Association of the Middle West and South; From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality (2013), which won the Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion in Historical Studies from the American Academy of Religion; and The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire (2013), which has been translated into twelve languages. He is currently writing a global history of infectious disease.
