Professor Michelle Laughran: discusses plagues and pandemics.

History professor Michelle Laughran recently published two articles on the plague in Renaissance Venice in two different exhibition catalogs. And one of these exhibitions travelled to the prestigious National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. from March 24 to July 7, 2019.

She also followed up her most recent article with a presentation this past October that discussed plague epidemics in Venice and the current Coronavirus pandemic for the 50th anniversary general meeting of the founding Boston chapter of the Save Venice organization.

This fall, Laughran also taught a Special Topics course on the History of Epidemics and Epidemiology, which examined the history of outbreaks, their consequences, and societies’ attempts at disease control, including during epidemics of bubonic plague, smallpox, and the 1918 “Spanish Flu.”

Her latest articles:
“The Plague,” in Venetia 1600: Births and Rebirths [exhibition catalog] (Fondazione Musei Civici Venezia, 2021)

“‘When God’s Majesty Publicly Scourges a People’: Combatting Plague in Sixteenth-Century Venice,” in Art, Faith and Medicine in Tintoretto’s Venice [exhibition catalog] (Marsilio Editori, 2018)