Meet the Director of Undergraduate Research and Scholarship: Timothy Newfield, PhD
Timothy Newfield, PhD, is a historical epidemiologist, an environmental historian, and Professor in the Departments of History and Biology. As an historian of disease, he studies how humans have manipulated the environment in ways that have been conducive to disease emergencies in interdisciplinary teams which include archaeologists, paleogenomicists, evolutionary biologists and other specialists in the sciences of the past.
This interdisciplinary research has allowed Newfield and the interdisciplinary teams he is part of to expand the ways in which knowledge is produced and used in each field and the nature of the fields themselves. Thus, the sciences of the human past allow them to identify proxies, independent of the written sources, that can provide a less biased account of what happened, about for instance the origins, spread and impact of historical disease events. Interdisciplinary dialogue ensures that data are properly framed and contextualized and that research projects serve a purpose now, and produce data that we need or that can answer the questions that we have.
His papers have appeared in Agricultural History Review, Annales, Argos, Climatic Change, Climate of the Past, Early Medieval Europe, Euro-Mediterranean Journal for Environmental Integration, Geology, History Compass, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Journal of Roman Archaeology, Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research, Medizinhistorisches Journal, Nature, Nature Ecology and Evolution, Post-Classical Archaeologies, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Royal Society Open Society, Social Science and Medicine, and in edited volumes.
Meet our new Director of Undergraduate Research and Scholarship, Professor Timothy Newfield! Dr. Newfield is a historical epidemiologist, environmental historian, and assistant professor in the…
In April 2023, Core Faculty Dr. Timothy Newfield hosted a 22-talk, 2-day meeting that brought together scholars from many disciplines, including History, Archaeology, Anthropology, Paleopathology,…
Timothy Newfield and his research team use palaeoenvironmental reconstructions, historical records and climate model simulations to assess the potential broader impact of the 852/3 CE eruption of Mount Churchill, Alaska, was one of the largest first-millennium volcanic events.…
Timothy Newfield and his co-authors write about their application of a pioneering new approach, ‘big data palaeoecology’ to evaluate the scale of the Black Death’s mortality on a regional scale across Europe using palynological data.…
The New York Times covers the research Timothy Newfield co-authored and recently published on the uneven impacts of the plague across Europe, causing “a patchwork of destruction”.…
Timothy Newfield, Adam Izdebski and Alessia Masi compared the Black Death’s demographic impact across the continent, concluding that the pandemic’s toll was not as universal as currently claimed, nor was it always catastrophic.…
Emily Mendenhall, Timothy Newfield and Alexander Tsai introduce an Special Issue of Social Science & Medicine, focused on Rethinking Syndemics through time, space, and method.…
Timothy Newfield talks to Merle Eisenberg and Lee Mordechai about the connected histories of climate change and diseases that become pandemics, focusing on the early medieval and late antique periods.…
Timothy Newfield presented his work on “Local Dimming or Global Blackout? Mysterious Clouding and Climate Change in the Sixth Century: Science, Sources, and Reconstructions” at the 53rd Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies Spring Symposium.…
The team of researchers that includes Timothy Newfield and Jakob Burnham proposes an interdisciplinary framework for uncovering climate–society interactions that emphasizes the mechanics by which climate change has influenced human history, and the uncertainties of discerning that influence across spatiotemporal scales. …
Timothy Newfield and his co-authors explore potential associations between pandemic disease and climate in Mediterranean history. They make sense of the influence that meteorological, climatological and environmental factors had on historical disease outbreaks.…
In this event, hosted by Georgetown University Press, Georgetown College, and Georgetown University Library as part of the Books for a Better World series, Timothy Newfield talks about the history of infectious disease in the ancient world.…
Timothy Newfield talks with co-hosts Dagomar Degroot and Emma Moesswilde about what led him to the History and Biology departments at Georgetown University, and about his work in the thriving field of historical epidemiology.…
In this piece, published on the Georgetown Environmental History blog, Timothy Newfield argues against the trend to compare COVID-19 with other pandemics in history.…
Timothy Newfield addresses historical parallels regarding pandemics. He argues that our instinct to look to the past for ways forward can be harmful when it comes to pandemics.…
The team of researchers that includes Emily Mendenhall and Timothy Newfield uses historical data to trace range shifts in Anopheles mosquitoes, which are the vector of malaria and several neglected tropical diseases.…
Timothy Newfield inquires on the influence of climate on disease in Late Antiquity. Particular attention is paid to the Justinianic Plague, but the potential impacts of a changing climate on malaria and non-yersinial, non-plague, epidemics are not overlooked.…