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About Me

Cindy Ermus is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she teaches courses on early modern European history, the Age of Revolutions, and the history of disasters and disease. She has published various studies in the history of science, medicine, and the environment in eighteenth-century France and the Atlantic and Mediterranean Worlds, as well as on digital and computational history and the future of the historical profession. She is also 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.

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), which explores themes and moments in the history of revolutions.

Recent Publications

Last updated March 2020

• Books

The Great Plague Scare of 1720: Disaster and Society in the Eighteenth-Century World (under advance contract with Cambridge University Press).

Environmental Disaster in the Gulf South: Two Centuries of Catastrophe, Risk, and Resilience. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2018. Editor and Introduction. (Available on Amazon. More info on LSU Press website.)

• Peer-Reviewed Publications

“The History of Science and the Science of History: Computational Methods, Algorithms, and the Future of the Field,” with Abraham H. Gibson. Isis 110, no. 3 (September 2019): 555-66.

“Swamp Things: Invasive Species as Environmental Disaster in the Gulf South,” with Abraham H. Gibson. In Environmental Disaster in the Gulf South: Two Centuries of Catastrophe, Risk, and Resilience, edited by Cindy Ermus. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2018.

“The Spanish Plague That Never Was: Crisis and Exploitation in Cádiz During the Peste of Provence.” Special issue on Humans and the Environment in the Long Eighteenth Century, Eighteenth-Century Studies 49, no. 2 (January 2016): 167-93.

“The Plague of Provence: Early Advances in the Centralization of Crisis Management.” Arcadia: Environment & Society, no. 9 (2015).

“Reduced to Ashes: The Good Friday Fire of 1788 in Spanish Colonial New Orleans.” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association LIV, no. 3 (Summer 2013): 292-331.

• Selected Digital Humanities/Publications

Age of Revolutions Academic Blog. Co-founder and Co-Executive Editor with Bryan Banks, and contributor. 2015-present. www.AgeofRevolutions.com

“Leadership Matters in the First Days and Weeks of an Outbreak: Lessons from the Great Plague of Marseille, 300 Years Later,” Voltaire Foundation Enlightenment Blog. April 2020.

“Environmental Disaster in the Gulf South: Scholarship on Catastrophe, Risk, and Resilience.” LSU Press Blog. February 2018.

• Op-Ed Pieces & Scholarly Journalism

“The danger of prioritizing politics and economics during the coronavirus outbreak: Three hundred years later, the lessons of the Great Plague of Provence are sounding an alarm,” The Washington Post, March 13, 2020.

“The Cuban Revolution and Me,” In Cuba Today, July 5, 2016. Cover story. (Also on www.AgeofRevolutions.com).

“What does it mean to be ‘a product of the Cuban Revolution,’” The Miami Herald, July 25, 2016.

“¿Qué significa ser ‘un producto de la revolución cubana’?”, El Nuevo Herald & En Cuba Hoy (cover story), July 25, 2016.

• Selected Book Reviews

Review of A Not-So-New World: Empire and Environment in French Colonial North America, by Christopher M. Parsons (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) for H-Environment Roundtable Reviews (January 2020).

Review of Liberty or Death: The French Revolution, by Peter McPhee (Yale University Press, 2016) in Canadian Journal of History /Annales canadiennes d’histoire (Winter 2017), 592-94.

Review of Natural Interests: The Contest over Environment in Modern France, by Caroline Ford (Harvard University Press, 2016) in Canadian Journal of History /Annales canadiennes d’histoire (Autumn 2017), 349-51.

Review of Assumed Identities: The Meanings of Race in the Atlantic World, edited by John D. Garrigus (Texas A&M University Press, 2010) in Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association Vol. LIV, No. 2 (Spring 2013), 216-18.

Media Coverage

Appearances in The Atlantic, Washington Post, BBC World News, Univisión, Al Jazeera

Twitter

@CindyErmus

Country Focus

France & Atlantic

Expertise by Geography

Atlantic, France, Mediterranean, Western Europe

Expertise by Chronology

4, 6, 7

Expertise by Topic

Diplomacy, Environment, Gender, Medicine, Rebellion & Revolution, Science, Women