On Friday, April 5 at 2 pm in Hibben 105, Dr. Sharon DeWitte will present her talk  Famine, Frailty, and Plague: Health and Demography in the Context of Medieval Mortality Crises as part of the Anthropology Colloquia Series.

Dr. DeWitte is a biological anthropologist whose expertise is bioarchaeology, and specifically paleoepidemiology, i.e., the application of data from human skeletal remains ethically excavated from archaeological sites to investigate population-level patterns of health and disease in past populations. Her research primarily focuses on mortality patterns during medieval plague epidemics in Europe and Central Asia caused by Yersinia pestis that were part of the larger Second Pandemic of Plague (c. 14^th-19^th centuries). She also examines health and demography before and after historical plague epidemics to understand local syndemic interactions that shape the outcomes of those epidemics and how epidemic disease affects biosocial conditions in surviving populations.