Merle Eisenberg
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merleeisenberg.bsky.social
Merle Eisenberg
@merleeisenberg.bsky.social
3.8K followers 640 following 910 posts
Assistant Professor of History, Oklahoma State University.
PhD, Princeton University
Middle Ages & Late Antiquity | Pandemics & Plague | Environmental
Podcast: Infectious Historians @ infectioushistorians.com
Also: Arsenal | Mets | Vikings | UConnWBB
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merleeisenberg.bsky.social
Article critique of the day: tinyurl.com/mrxdb4fk. I'll just add that the paragraphs below make the leap from "college is too expensive" which is a structural problem at state universities because of planned disinvestment to Ivy League schools are filled with bad people so we need to blow them up.
The evidence is overwhelming: outrageous costs and prolonged indebtedness for students; poor outcomes, with too many students left unable to find meaningful work after graduating; some talented domestic students and scholars have been crowded out of enrollment and employment opportunities by international students; and a high degree of uniformity of thought among faculty members and administrators, which can result in a hostile environment for students with different ideas. Critics have argued that it is not the place of the federal government to solve these problems. But without government involvement, reform will be difficult. Many colleges and universities, and especially some of the oldest and traditionally prestigious schools, are burdened with archaic governance structures that make self-reform all but impossible. This means that course correction must come from the outside.
October 10, 2025 at 2:22 PM
merleeisenberg.bsky.social
Academic debate of the day, especially with the medieval call back: www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/o.... It has good ideas, but the quote text below is key IMO. All of this requires small classes or at least small sections, which goes against current university financial goals.
There is the problem of scale. With some lecture classes in the hundreds of students, in-class conversation is a nonstarter. We may have to do more assessment in sections run by teaching assistants or hold proctored, in-person writing sessions. Studies testing large-scale oral exams are already being published.
August 26, 2025 at 11:55 AM
merleeisenberg.bsky.social
Top 10 in Infectious Disease Podcasts! Also, the only humanities/social science podcast in the top 10 so that is doubly great. Check out the full list: www.millionpodcasts.com/Infectious-D.... Give us a listen if you are interested as well: infectioushistorians.com (or via Spotify, iTunes, etc.)
Best Infectious Disease Podcast
August 13, 2025 at 3:49 PM
merleeisenberg.bsky.social
Interesting essay with which I disagree at points: aeon.co/essays/the-g.... But the quote is useful since historical analysis is about perspectives. The framing as 99% v 1% is not a great binary, even if I get the genre: pushing back on the public belief that historical states & empires are "good."
This 1-per-cent view has skewed our perspective on collapse and history. What we need now is a history of collapse for the 99 per cent. Only with that can we truly understand what the rise and fall of empires meant, both for the people of the past and also for us today.
August 6, 2025 at 2:26 PM
merleeisenberg.bsky.social
Apparently my dad just watches movies daily: professorcurmudgeon.substack.com/p/the-materi.... New day, new short review.
This is a romantic comedy for today. It’s about a professional matchmaker in Manhattan who is torn between a wealthy private equity man who has family money through the business in which he, his brother and his parents work and a poor, struggling actor with whom the matchmaker broke up years ago (when they were in their 20s) because he had no money and she didn’t want to spend her life struggling financially. The private equity man is a “unicorn”. He checks all the boxes for the type of man women want to marry. He has market value. He even had his height physically altered by 6 inches to improve his boxes. Yet the film rejects him as her match because he’s neither in love with her nor she with him. He makes her feel more valuable but just saying that is to understand the financial deal-making that underlies their relationship. You can marry a wealthy person or be alone for the rest of your life - but that’s the same thing, as a character observes. Instead, you are looking for a “nursing-home partner and a grave buddy.” The struggling actor offers only his unconditional love as they age together, and she realizes that doing the math doesn’t suffice in choosing a marriage partner. Thus, they substitute getting married at the clerk’s office for what otherwise might have been an enormous wedding. There’s no guarantee that their relationship will last. They might divorce once they have kids, and they will then resent their kids for seeing what’s happened to them. Yet the film still opts for love over the transactional deal. Being in love feels easy. Romance doesn’t get much better, and I’m a sucker for romance.
July 15, 2025 at 11:58 AM
merleeisenberg.bsky.social
My sister set my dad up to write short posts about movies he's seen. Titled appropriately "Professor Curmudgeon" since he is an old guy snarkily reviewing films. Give his short excerpts a read if you are interested. See his example below and link: professorcurmudgeon.substack.com/p/jurassic-w...
Where to begin? This is a boring movie with poor special effects, no characters to speak of, awkward mis-en-scene, and a narrative that is plodding, easily anticipatable, and not believable. Really, no sex and a cute kid with a cute dinosaur? More, wondrous and larger images readily translate themselves into fake-looking CGI. Scarlett Johansson, who plays the protagonist, makes for a poor action hero. She’s also too short. The characters sometimes talk seriously and at lengthy to each other but such talk is disconnected from the visuals and narrative. There are two separate sets of characters to ramp up the thrill but two lines of action serve only to further disconnect us from the film. Capitalism is evil (though not so evil that the producers hope to make money on this latest sequel), and open source code is good (except for IP which the producers are relying on to make money). In the opening scenes it’s revealed that humans have become bored with dinosaurs. So should audiences.
July 14, 2025 at 1:47 PM
merleeisenberg.bsky.social
New article, "Pandemics in the Late Roman and Byzantine Empires" in the Oxford Environmental History Bibliography. Find it: tinyurl.com/38hsrnvx or can DM/email me for a copy. I tried to be as even-handed as possible to give a sense of the field for those who want to know more about diseases.
Pandemics in the Late Roman and Byzantine Empires
June 24, 2025 at 1:29 PM
merleeisenberg.bsky.social
Revealing discussion between Douthat & Tony Gilroy (Andor creator). Douthat makes Andor into a left film even as he isn't rooting for the Empire, so it makes zero sense. Anyway, Gliroy responds broadly about arts & empathy (see screen shot) worth a read. Full interview: tinyurl.com/4a5at35x
Let’s stick with Hollywood. Making a living as an actor or as a writer or a director — without the higher degree of empathy that you have, the more aware you are of behavior and all kinds of behavior, the better you’re going to be at your job. We feed our families by being in an empathy business. It’s just baked in. You’re trying to pretend to be other people. The whole job is to pretend to be other, and what is it like to look from this? People may be less successful over time at portraying Nazis as humans, and that may be good writing or bad writing, and there may be people that have an ax to grind. But in general, empathy is how I feed my family. And the more finely tuned that is, the better I am at my job. That is what actors do: I’m going on Broadway, I’m playing a villain for six months. I got to live in that. I’m playing the slave, I’m playing the fisherman, I’m playing the nurse, I’m the murderer — you have to get in there. You have to live lives through other people. I think that the simple act of that transformation and that process automatically gives you what I would describe as a more generous and progressive point of view. It just has to.
June 5, 2025 at 5:37 PM
merleeisenberg.bsky.social
The French give the agency to Philip here, which is the nice way of saying King John sucks.
Map of the losses by King John
April 26, 2025 at 5:07 PM
merleeisenberg.bsky.social
Really proud and pleased to see Lee Mordechai's work on Gaza discussed in the New York Review of books. Link: (www.nybooks.com/articles/202...). If you want the article send me a DM and screen shot of the discussion of Lee's below.
Several people I spoke with compared their sense of normalcy in proximity to atrocity to the film The Zone of Interest (2023), about the Nazi commandant of Auschwitz Rudolf Höss, who lived with his family in a well-kept house just outside the camp. Some reservists, I was told, had returned from Gaza suffering from severe PTSD and gotten no help. Some of them—according both to my source and to reports in the Israeli media—have died by suicide. On my trip I met with Lee Mordechai, a brave young professor at Hebrew University who has compiled an immense list of crimes perpetrated by the IDF, which he regularly updates and posts online. Like recent reports by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and MSF, it makes for chilling but necessary reading.
April 25, 2025 at 1:21 AM
merleeisenberg.bsky.social
I have nothing in the bank for this one so please post images for me to use for teaching. Thanks! I'll give you me at Caesarea in Israel as payment...
Merle standing at the port of Caesarea
April 16, 2025 at 12:21 AM
merleeisenberg.bsky.social
New Episode alert: "Marian Devotion and Plague in Late Medieval Italy." Lee and I spoke with Bianca Lopez (SMU) about her book on plague, piety and power in late medieval Italy. A great convo on Santa Maria di Loreto & the impact of the Black Death. Listen: infectioushistorians.com/2025/03/07/m...
Marian Devotion and Plague in Late Medieval Italy
April 14, 2025 at 2:05 PM
merleeisenberg.bsky.social
Like this cool thing?
Byzantine Ivory
April 13, 2025 at 11:58 PM
merleeisenberg.bsky.social
Ohhhhhh. I would love maps for this. All I have is like that below which is pretty impossible to read. New ones much appreciated, since every time I use this I get annoyed.
Map of the early Islamic conquests that is not great to use
April 12, 2025 at 2:04 PM
merleeisenberg.bsky.social
I'll bite. Whoever made this map, wins all the prizes in my view:
Carolingian expansion map
April 10, 2025 at 5:52 PM
merleeisenberg.bsky.social
If you want something real how about this one. As you can tell, I'm a serious teacher.
Christopher Lee as Charlemagne
April 10, 2025 at 12:24 AM
merleeisenberg.bsky.social
Carolingians are silly so what about this one I always use. Dated pop references are the best.
The Merovingian from the Matrix
April 10, 2025 at 12:24 AM
merleeisenberg.bsky.social
Bilingual 7th c. papyri anyone?
Bilingual papyri
April 7, 2025 at 6:00 PM
merleeisenberg.bsky.social
UConn for the win!
UConn winning the national Championship.
April 6, 2025 at 10:32 PM
merleeisenberg.bsky.social
I'll bite again. Not a standard reconquest map, but I do like this detailed map of Constantinople.
Map of Constantinople
April 6, 2025 at 4:10 PM
merleeisenberg.bsky.social
Alright so this is more "late Roman" but it dates from the right time period and I need an excuse to post it. How about Lee Mordechai baptizing Brent Shaw in a 5th century baptismal font in the Negev (Israel).
Lee baptizes Brent Shaw
April 4, 2025 at 12:32 AM
merleeisenberg.bsky.social
Alright I'll bite on this. Here's the slide my students always love when discussing early Christian theology/christology.
Arius as a Bad Boy of Theology
April 1, 2025 at 4:17 PM
merleeisenberg.bsky.social
We also reflect on the radically different media ecosystems in which humanities and natural science pubs operate. Knowing the "rules of the game" are central to what we write, where we publish, and how non-humanities people read our work. Worth a read just for this matter of fact discussion! 3/end.
Second, media interest in nuanced humanities outcomes is significantly lower than in natural science stories, especially as the latter discuss new discoveries with empirical data and tend to find simple narratives strikingly attractive. Moreover, universities and research groups have their own media apparatuses developed to facilitate the broader media’s efforts for science communication. Media stories also have far more difficulty with humanities articles, such as this one, that argue for nuance and context. Humanities scholars sometimes (rightly) bemoan journalists’ simple narratives, often framed with out-of-date historical analysis, but the humanities publication process makes this status quo difficult to challenge. This article therefore aims to demonstrate one way to respond to these inherent problems in research that cuts across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. It suggests that we must work together with our colleagues in different fields to harness the power of various disciplines, with each discipline alternating in leading a study, as necessary. These collaborative projects, however, must also make clear the limits of the humanities and its different approach to publishing, especially in conversation with research happening in the natural sciences.
March 31, 2025 at 1:17 PM
merleeisenberg.bsky.social
I was very happy the editors at the @medievalacademy.bsky.social's journal allowed us to add an opening note where we reflect on the power of collaborative work and the timeline for when we wrote, edited, and published the article. It reveals a lot about humanities vs. natural science pubs. 2/
This article would have been inconceivable without authors contributing from different but complementary disciplines. We hope this article demonstrates the power of a collaborative, multidisciplinary approach and helps to continue to shift norms in medieval studies toward more collaborative work.
March 31, 2025 at 1:17 PM
merleeisenberg.bsky.social
Excited that our article "Burial Archaeology and the First Plague Pandemic" is out open access (aka free to read). Really pleased that archaeologists led this and it was collaborative, as the best plague studies are. Abstract in the image and link: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/... 1/
Archaeological evidence from funerary contexts is largely ignored in current scholarship on the First Plague Pandemic, despite the important information that burials and cemeteries can provide about how plague might have affected societies. Skeletal (mainly dental) remains are used in the paleogenomic search for victims of plague (Yersinia pestis), but significant contextual information is to be gained from plague-positive graves through bioarchaeological study of the complete individual and their broader funerary context, both of which are largely absent from current scholarship. We argue that future scholarship on the First Plague Pandemic must bring burial archaeology to the growing body of evidence, and archaeologists themselves must lead or be involved in this research. We present three ways in which burial archaeology can be used effectively to study the impact of first-pandemic plague on individuals and communities: by reconsidering whether we should be looking for an archaeology of “crisis” for this disease event, by evaluating burial archaeology (especially of multiple burials) in its proper sociocultural context, and by examining bioarchaeological evidence from entire cemeteries where plague genomes are recovered in any quantity. We conclude by offering an example of how such archaeological evidence can be more inclusively and effectively incorporated into interdisciplinary plague studies, to the benefit of the field.
March 31, 2025 at 1:17 PM