Tim Newfield is a historical epidemiologist and environmental historian. After defending his doctoral thesis in History and Classical Studies at McGill University in 2011, he held postdoctoral fellowships at the universities of Michigan (History), Stirling (Centre for Environment, Heritage and Policy) and Princeton (History & the Environmental Institute). Tim joined Georgetown University as an Assistant Professor in History and Biology in Spring 2017. He works primarily on the history of infectious disease and climate in the first millennium CE. He teaches environmental, medical and medieval history, as well as the history of global health and epidemiology.
Tim’s recent articles have focused on the origins of smallpox, the first-plague pandemic, human-bovine plagues and the measles-rinderpest divergence, the prevalence of vivax and malariae malaria in late antiquity, the 376-386 bovine panzootic (an intercontinental cattle plague that seems not to have occurred), and the timing and consequences of first-millennium CE volcanic eruptions (such as the ninth-century eruptions of Katla and Churchill, and the tenth-century eruption of Eldgjá ). He completed a synthesis of the historical and palaeoclimatic scholarship on the 535-550 global climatic downturn for the Palgrave Handbook of Climate History in 2018 and continues, on and off, to work on 536 and its purported associations to first-pandemic plague and societal disruption. Similarly extensive surveys of sixth-century 'smallpox' and the place of paleoclimatology and palynology in histories of first-pandemic plague appeared in edited volumes in 2024. Work in progress considers the history of short-term/rapid climate change and food shortage in the Frankish period, how the Medieval Climatic Anomaly and the rise of the Mongol Empire may have altered the pathogenic load of European and West Asian livestock, and a general reappraisal of the ancient pandemics.
His work has appeared in Agricultural History Review (2009), Annales (2022), Argos (2012), Biology Letters (2023), Climatic Change (2018, 2020), Climate of the Past (2022), Early Medieval Europe (2017), Environmental Archaeology (2023), Euro-Mediterranean Journal for Environmental Integration (2020), Geology (2017), History Compass (2018×3), Journal of Interdisciplinary History (2015, 2017), Journal of Roman Archaeology (2017, 2022), Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research (2020), Medizinhistorisches Journal (2020×2), Nature (2021), Nature Ecology and Evolution (2022×2), Post-Classical Archaeologies (2015), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2018, 2019), Royal Society Open Science (2017), Social Science and Medicine (2022), Studies in Late Antiquity (2022), and in edited volumes (2012, 2013, 2013, 2018×2, 2022×2, 2023, 2024×2). He also co-leads the Climate Change and History Research Initiative (cchri.princeton.edu) at Princeton University.
Publications: https://georgetown.academia.edu/TimothyPNewfield
Supervising:
Bryna Cameron-Steinke (early medieval landscape and epidemiological history, defended June 2024, Marjorie McLean Oliver postdoctoral fellow at Queen's University)
Dylan Proctor (twentieth-century interdisciplinary disease history, defended March 2022, CDC postdoctoral fellow)
Rachel Singer (early medieval environment, disease and colonialism)
Luca Barison (high medieval environment and colonialism)
Currently interested in supervising doctoral students in interdisciplinary historical epidemiology and in interdisciplinary late antique and medieval environmental history.