Professor Samuel Cohn, currently in residence as a Visiting Research Fellow at IASH, has been elected this week as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Professor Cohn is one of just 56 Fellows elected this year across the RSE's multidisciplinary purview spanning the arts, business, science and technology sectors.
Educated at Union College (New York), Università degli Studi di Firenze (Italy), and with a PhD from Harvard University, Cohn has been Professor of Medieval History at the University of Glasgow since 1995. Over the years, he has carved out a widely respected career in medical and social history, producing key monographs in the field such as The Black Death Transformed: Disease and Culture in Early Renaissance Europe (Oxford University Press) and Popular protest in late medieval Europe: Italy, France, and Flanders (Manchester University Press).
President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, said in a press release yesterday: "Each of our new Fellows is elected on the distinguished merit of their work. In joining the RSE, they strengthen our capacity to support excellence across all areas of academic and public life, both in Scotland and further afield.”
This has certainly been the case during Professor Cohn's time at IASH, where the Institute community has not only benefited from his research expertise but also from his generous mentorship and support of early career researchers. As Dr Chisomo Kalinga, an IASH Postdoctoral Fellow researching in the medical humanities says: "Professor Cohn's presence at IASH has been a wonderful opportunity for those of us just who are just finding our paths as academics. He is a natural and generous mentor and seems as eager to learn from us as we are grateful to learn from him."
At IASH, Professor Cohn is researching the emotional life of epidemics from antiquity to the present, challenging current assumptions that epidemics led to class hate and scapegoating the ‘other’, especially when diseases were ‘mysterious’ and their cures unknown. Instead, Cohn says, such a disease-hate nexus was extremely rare before 1500, when all diseases were mysterious.
More about Professor Cohn's current research can be found here.