Events

K. Iver is a nonbinary trans poet born in Mississippi. Their book Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco won the 2022 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry from Milkweed Editions. Short Film won the Wisconsin Book Award and was named a Best Book of 2023 by the New York Public Library. Iver has received fellowships from The Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. They have a Ph.D. in Poetry from Florida State University.

Major events in history usually have pretty clear dates. The bigger the event, the more fixed it is in the general cultural memory. Yet a surprising result of the past decade of research on the Black Death—generally regarded as the largest (or at least, most severe) pandemic in history—has been an overturning of its conventional dates.

Whereas the prior 700 years of historiography were grounded solely on human reports of mass mortality, now there is a new kind of evidence that can show the pandemic’s true extent. Thanks to work in paleogenetics and bioarchaeology, we can now see the pandemic from the bacterium’s point-of-view: from the initial circumstances that pushed a single highly-lethal strain out of its long-term animal reservoirs in Central Asia, up to the mechanisms that transferred this single-celled organism more than halfway across the Eurasian continent, creating new reservoirs in new animal and insect hosts.

We also now have a considerably longer timeline. Not just a few years, from 1346 to 1353, but nearly a century and a half from the initial reports of epidemics in China to the complex circumstances that brought the disease to the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe. Even the events of 1347/48 (recounted so memorably by Boccaccio and others) were not plague’s first arrival in the West. Earlier waves of plague, which we can now document for the first time, in fact help explain a variety of other calamities, from episodes of lethal famines to persecutions of minority communities. 

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Monica H. Green is a historian of medicine specializing in the history of the premodern period and the comparative history of global health. Trained in the History of Science at Princeton University, she has taught or held fellowships at leading institutions such as Duke University, the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), and All Souls College. Both her research and her teaching have been honored by top prizes, and she was recently recognized by having a prize named in her honor by the Medieval Academy of America. She is the author of “Putting Africa on the Black Death Map: Narratives from Genetics and History” (2018), “The Four Black Deaths” (2020), and most recently (with Nahyan Fancy) “Plague History, Mongol History, and the Processes of Focalisation Leading up to the Black Death” (2024). Her open-access teaching module, The Black Death: The Medieval Plague Pandemic through the Eyes of Ibn Battuta, launched in Fall 2025, and she is currently completing her book, The Black Death: A Global History.

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Event is co-sponsored by the History, Anthropology, and English departments

Aimee Nezhukumatathil returns to the University of South Florida this February to share her widely celebrated nature writings and work directly with the Faculty Fellows on one of their nature walks. She is the author of two illustrated essay collections, Bite by Bite and World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, & Other Astonishments, which was chosen as Barnes and Noble’s Book of the Year and named a finalist for the Kirkus Prize. Aimee has also authored four award-winning poetry collections and is releasing her newest poetry book, Night Owl, in March.

Her honors include a poetry fellowship from US Artist Fellows, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pushcart Prize, a Mississippi Arts Council grant, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. For a decade, she served as the poetry editor for Orion and Sierra magazines. A professor of English and Creative Writing for over twenty five years, she also serves as a firefly guide for Mississippi State Parks.  

Laura Ogden is a leading scholar in environmental anthropology and feminist political ecology. Her award-winning book Swamplife: People, Gators, and Mangroves Entangled in the Everglades is considered a foundational text in multispecies studies. Her latest book Loss and Wonder at the World’s End is based on a decade of research in the Fuegian Archipelago of Chile. In her talk, she will be discussing the ongoing legacy of Charles Darwin in the archipelago, with particular focus on the ways Darwin’s depictions of Indigenous people in the region continues to shape the present. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Jake Skeets is the author of Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, a National Poetry Series selection and winner of the American Book Award, Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Whiting Award. His work has appeared in journals and magazines such as Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, and The Paris Review. Other honors include an NEA Grant for Arts Projects, a Mellon Projecting All Voices Fellowship, and the 2023-2024 Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi. He is from the Navajo Nation and was appointed the 3rd Navajo Nation Poet Laureate. He is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma.