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Georgetown360

Timothy Newfield

Tim Newfield is a historical epidemiologist and environmental historian. After defending his doctoral thesis in History and Classical Studies at McGill University in 2011, he held postdoctoral fellowships at the universities of Michigan (History), Stirling (Centre for Environment, Heritage and Policy) and Princeton (History & High Meadows Environmental Institute). He joined Georgetown as an Assistant Professor in History and Biology in Spring 2017, and is now an Associate Professor.

He teaches interdisciplinary histories of infectious disease, global health, premodern environmental change, medical humanities, and the Middle Ages at Georgetown at the undergraduate and graduate levels. His recent work has focused on the Justinianic Plague and the first plague pandemics, on premodern human-bovine plagues and the measles-rinderpest divergence, on the prevalence of Plasmodium falciparum, Plasmodium vivax and Plasmodium malariae in ancient and medieval Europe, on short-term/rapid climate change and its societal consequences in the first millennium CE, on the murky origins of the Variola virus, and on an intercontinental bovine panzootic in late antiquity, which seems not to have occurred. He favours multidisciplinary, collaborative scholarship. 

His papers have appeared in Agricultural History Review (2009), Annales (2022), Argos (2012), Biology Letters (2023), Climatic Change (2018, 2020), Climate of the Past (2022), Early Medieval Europe (2017), Environmental Archaeology (2023), Euro-Mediterranean Journal for Environmental Integration (2020), Geology (2017), History Compass (2018x3), Human Ecology (2025), Journal of Interdisciplinary History (2015, 2017), Journal of Roman Archaeology (2017, 2022), Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research (2020), Medizinhistorisches Journal (2020x2), Nature (2021), Nature Ecology and Evolution (2022x2), Post-Classical Archaeologies (2015), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2018, 2019), Royal Society Open Science (2017), Social Science and Medicine (2022), Speculum (2025), Studies in Late Antiquity (2022), and in edited volumes (2012, 2013, 2013, 2018x2, 2022x2, 2023, 2024x2, 2025). He also co-leads the Climate Change and History Research Initiative (cchri.princeton.edu) at Princeton University, which has organized many symposia on premodern environmental history and which has near-annually held an introductory course in the natural sciences (focusing on palynology and paleoclimatology) for junior scholars in the humanities since 2015.

Forthcoming work reappraises the evidence (written, physical) for smallpox and its relatives in antiquity and the Middle Ages. At present, Tim is writing a short book for OUP on the history and science of antiquity’s pandemics and a monograph on subsistence crises, epidemics and epizootics in Carolingian Europe. He is also co-editing a multi-paper edited volume for Brepols on medieval food shortage and famine. 
 
Tim is interested in working with graduate students intrigued by the prelaboratory history of infectious disease and/or environmental change in the late antique/medieval Euro-Mediterranean region.

Supervising and Supervised (as lead advisor):
Luca Barison (high medieval colonialism and environmental change);
Bryna Cameron-Steinke (early medieval Francia and landscape history, defended June 2024, postdoctoral fellow Queen’s University);
Dylan Proctor (twentieth-century interdisciplinary disease history, defended March 2022, CDC postdoctoral fellow);
Rachel Singer (early medieval insular Europe and epidemiological history).