Thursday, March 27

Global Irish Studies presents:

“Coughing Cows, Mad Dogs, and Infected Bees: Making Sense of Animal Disease in Early Medieval Ireland”

A talk by Rachel Singer

On Thursday, March 27 from 6:30pm to 8:00pm in Leonard 133, Reynolds Hall. The talk is free to attend, and all are welcome, but reservations are required.

To get to Reynolds Hall, as you are walking from Leo J. O’Donovan Dining Hall towards the GU Shuttle Station, it will be the last building past the volleyball court.

“The annals and legal texts which survive from early medieval Ireland are chock-full of diseased livestock. They record everything from large-scale cattle plagues, to everyday poultry and horse ailments, to bizarre zoonotic outbreaks that also affected people. This talk considers animal disease in early medieval Ireland through cultural, economic, and environmental lenses. It examines what these records tell us about early medieval understandings of contamination and how the boundary between humans and animals could be breached. It also reviews potential economic causes and consequences of large-scale animal mortality and considers how both contemporary observers and modern scholars might place these outbreaks in their environmental contexts.”

Rachel Singer is a PhD candidate in Environmental History at Georgetown University and a 2022-23 Global Irish Studies Fellow. Her research focuses on climate change and infectious disease in early medieval Britain and Ireland. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Medieval Worlds, Early Medieval Europe, The English Historical Review, and is forthcoming from Speculum.