Thanks to the generous support of donors Stuart and Kate Riggsby, the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies was able to establish the annual Riggsby Lecture in 2004. This lecture series brings a prestigious scholar of the medieval Mediterranean to the University of Tennessee campus every fall to give a public talk on a medieval Mediterranean topic of the speaker’s choosing.

This year, we are pleased to welcome Professor Monica Green, who will be speaking on "A Mediterranean Divide: Islamic versus Christian Experiences of the Black Death."

Professor Green is a distinguished medieval historian and historian of science and medicine. She has previously held positions at Princeton, UNC Chapel Hill, Duke, and Arizona State, and most recently joined the Department of History at Stanford as the Suppes Visiting Professor. Her publications include Women’s Health Care in the Medieval West (Routledge, 2000) and Making Women’s Health Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-Modern Gynecology (Oxford University Press, 2009). Her recent work focuses on the history of the Black Death. culminating in a December 2020 article in the American Historical Review.