Bio

Cindy Ermus, Assistant Professor of History, teaches courses on early modern European history, the Age of Revolutions, and the history of disasters. She specializes in the history of science, medicine, and the environment, especially catastrophe and crisis management, in eighteenth-century France and the Atlantic and Mediterranean Worlds. She has also published on digital and computational history and the future of the historical profession, and she is the editor of a volume titled Environmental Disaster in the Gulf South: Two Centuries of Catastrophe, Risk and Resilience (LSU Press, 2018), which was featured in The Atlantic and Al Jazeera's NewsHour.

Her current book project, The Great Plague Scare of 1720: Disaster and Society in the Eighteenth-Century World (under advance contract with Cambridge University Press), is a transnational study of the Plague of Provence of 1720 (the "Great Plague of Marseille"), one of the last outbreaks of plague in Western Europe. By tracing responses to the threat of infection throughout a network of major eighteenth-century port cities, she explores the ways in which the crisis influenced society, politics, and commerce beyond France, in neighboring regions, and in the Atlantic and Pacific colonies.

She also has an interest in the digital humanities, and is co-founder, executive editor, and contributor at www.AgeofRevolutions.com (on Twitter @AgeofRevs).