Late Antique Disasters with Kristina Sessa
Episode 110 - May 19, 2023
Kristina Sessa (Ohio State University) comes on the podcast to discuss her work on late antique historical disasters. After a brief overview of late antiquity and its importance in global history, Tina discusses her categorization of disasters and how it relates to broader disaster studies. The conversation zooms out to consider broader environmental history and environmental determinism before zooming back in to reflect upon the meaning of disaster for modern observers-historians compared to contemporaries who experienced the disaster at the time. Tina also discusses the sources she uses in her research, the role of numbers in disaster reports, as well as how contemporaries conceived of disasters.
Further Reading
- Hendrick Dey and Paolo Squatriti, "Late Antique 'Natural' Disasters: de te fabula narratur?," Antiquité Tardive 29 (2021): 69-80.
- Lee Mordechai, "Short-Term Cataclysmic Events in Premodern Complex Societies," Human Ecology (2018): 323-333.
- Jacob A. C. Remes and Andy Horowitz, eds. Critical Disaster Studies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021).
- Kristina Sessa, “Rome at War: The Effects of Crisis on Church and Community in Late Antiquity” in Reconsidering the Renewal of Rome After Antiquity: Urban Developments of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, eds. Gregor Kalas and Ann Van Dijk (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021), 41-73.
- Kristina Sessa. “The New Environmental Fall of Rome: A Methodological Consideration,” Journal of Late Antiquity 12.1 (2019): 211-255.
- Jerry Toner, Roman Disasters (London: Polity Press, 2013).
Our Guest
Kristina Sessa
Professor, Department of History, Ohio State University