Historian Cindy Ermus' book, The Great Plague Scare of 1720: Disaster and Diplomacy in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World, was awarded the Urban History Association's Lynn Hollen Lees Book Prize for best book in European urban history published in 2023.
"Ermus expertly ties this story of quarantines, blockades, and inspections to the process of state-making and to the growth of scientific understandings of disease," the organization's news release states. "As urban historians debate how best to link particular urban stories to more general patterns, Ermus's research design offers an elegant way forward in global urban history, while advancing understanding of practices of disaster management within the early modern Atlantic World."
Ermus is Charles and Linda Wilson Professor in the History of Medicine in the Department of History and director of the Humanities in Medicine program. The book was published by Cambridge University Press.
