Carlos Grenier will discuss plagues, epidemics, and their responses in the Ottoman Empire and the early modern Middle East and Mediterranean. The primary focus will be how Muslims, Jews, and Christians living under Ottoman rule adapted to the various waves of bubonic plague and other diseases that swept across the Eastern Mediterranean region in the years from around 1400 to 1800. Part of the Mondays at the Museum Spring 2022 Lecture Series, “Jews, Plagues, and Pandemics.”

Carlos Grenier is a historian in the Department of Religious Studies at Florida International University. His interests include popular religion in the early Ottoman Empire, Sufism and Sufis within their late medieval and early modern political contexts, vernacular Islamic literature within global Islam, and the philosophy of nature. His dissertation, “The Yazıcıoğlus and the Spiritual Vernacular of the Early Ottoman Frontier,” examines the formation of popular forms of Islam along the fifteenth-century Ottoman borderlands of the Balkans and Mediterranean. In addition to teaching at FIU, Grenier is preparing future projects on Sufism and statecraft as well as sacred-historical narratives in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Islamic lands.