Winchell Endowed Lecture

Where do pandemics come from? Using Black Death narratives to rethink the origin of pandemics

Free registration is required

On April 24th at 6:00PM in Barbara Weitz Community Engagement Center rooms 201-209, the Department of History will welcome Dr. Monica Green as this year's Richard Dean Winchell Lecturer.

Discover how pandemics truly begin—and why they thrive—by tracing their path from medieval plagues to modern outbreaks. In this talk, Dr. Green will reveal how infectious diseases jump species barriers, travel global networks, and persist for centuries. Drawing on cutting-edge genetics and fresh insights into the Black Death, she’ll show how history can guide us in confronting pandemics today—and preventing them tomorrow.

Dr. Monica H. Green is an award-winning historian specializing in the history of medicine and global health, with a particular focus on the medieval period. Her pioneering work bridges the humanities and sciences, integrating historical research with cutting-edge genetics to explore the origins and spread of pandemics, including the Black Death. A Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, Dr. Green has published extensively on the history of disease, women’s health, and medical knowledge transmission across cultures. As an independent scholar, she continues to shape global conversations on historical epidemiology and the interdisciplinary study of health.

• Co-sponsored by Medieval/Renaissance Studies
• Additional funding for this event was provided by Humanities Nebraska and the Nebraska Cultural Endowment.

Winchell Lecturers (1997-Present)

2023-2024 Jan Grabowski, "Producing a 'Usuable' Past: Holocaust Distortion and New Threats to the Memory of the Holocaust" (March 2024)

2022-2023 Kathleen Belew, "Understanding White Supremacy: Decoding the Actions of the White Power Movement." (April 2023)

2020-2021 Lisa Tetrault, "When Women Won the Right to Vote: An American Fiction" (September 2020)

2019-2020 Daniel R. Wildcat, "The Indigenous Human Rights Legacy of the Late Vine Deloria, Jr." (November 2019)

2018-2019 Martha S. Jones, "Birthright Citizens" (September 2018)

2017-2018 Sarah Lopez, "Mapping the Marginal Role of Design in Immigrant Detention in Texas, 1950s-present" (November 2017)

2016-2017 Philip J. Deloria, "Toward an American Indian Abstract: The Art and Politics of Mary Sully" (November 2016)

2015-2016 Graham Wrightson and Carolyn Willekes, "Marching with Alexander the Great" (April 2016)

2014-2015 Christopher Browning, "Survivor Testimony and Holocaust History: The Case of the Starachowice Factory Slave Labor Camps" (November 2014) *Listen here on KIOS

2013-2014 Kim E. Nielsen, "Helen Keller, Anne Sullivan Macy, and the Blurry Lenses of Disability History" (September 2013)

2012-2013 William Tsutsui, "From Hiroshima to Fukushima: Godzilla and Postwar Japan" (October 2012)

2011-2012 Peter Coclanis, "Would Slavery Have Survived Without the Civil War?"(October 2011)

2010-2011 Stephanie Coontz, "Courting Trouble: The Past and Future of Marriage in America" (April 2011)

2009-2010 Clayton Laurie, "Accountability and the CIA" (March 2010)

2009-2010 Sam Walker, "The Great Presidential Speeches They Did Not Give: Presidents and Civil Liberties, Wilson to Bush" (October 2009)

2008-2009 Alan E. Steinweis, "The Kristallnacht Pogrom in Germany, November 1938: Myths and Realities" (November 2008)

2007-2008 Floyd Abrams, "History, Journalists, and the Law in the New Century" (April 2008)

2005-2006 Thomas Borstelmann, "The Changing Face of America's Enemies" (September 2005)

2004-2005 Marcus Rediker, "Villains of All Nations" (September 2004)

2003-2004 Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, "Well Behaved Women Seldom Make History" (September 2003)

2002-2003 Alan Bernstein, "The Formation of Hell in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages" (October 2002)

2001-2002 Eugene N. Borza, "Alexander the Great in Our Time" (February 2002)

1999-2000 Eric Monkkonen, "American Murders: Patterns of Two Centuries"

1998-1999 Joyce Appleby, "Completing the Revolution, The First Generation of Americans"

1997-1998 Dane Kennedy, "Sir Richard Francis Burton and the Uses of Orientalism"

1996-1997 Thomas Neville Bonner, "The Academy Then and Now: A Personal Odyssey" (October 1997)

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