Please join us:
Extreme Weather as a Catalyst for Violence and Conflict in Medieval Ireland, 650-1400 CE
Francis Ludlow
Yale Climate and Energy Institute, Yale University
Friday, December 4, 12:20-1:15, AUST 434
At Yale, Francis’ project “Climate as Catalyst in 1,224 Years of Violence and Conflict in Ireland, 425-1649 CE” aims to exploit Ireland’s rich record of medieval chronicles to reconstruct the incidence of a wide array of violence and conflict, including battles, slave and cattle raids, burning of crops and settlements, and the killings of secular and ecclesiastical elites. Such events are recorded systematically in the chronicles on an annual basis, and thereby provide an opportunity to examine the influence of extreme weather, natural hazards and abrupt climatic changes (as registered in natural climate proxies such as the Irish oak tree-ring record) on violence and conflict in a complex agrarian society across a twelve-century period. Before coming to Yale, he held the position of Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU Munich, 2013-2014). From 2011 to 2013 he was a Ziff Environmental Fellow with the Harvard University Center for the Environment where he worked on a project entitled Unifying High-Resolution Records of Environmental and Societal Stresses for Ireland, 425-1650 CE, combining Irish annalistic and tree-ring records with ice-core records. From 2012 to 2013 he was a Research Affiliate of the Harvard University Center for Geographic Analysis, and from 2011 to 2013 held the position of Research Associate with the Trinity Long Room Hub. From 2009 to 2011 Francis was a pre and postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Trinity Long Room Hub, and from 2007 to 2011 lectured in the Department of Geography, School of Natural Sciences, Trinity College Dublin. Francis obtained a B.A. in Geography and Economics from Trinity College Dublin in 2003, a Postgraduate Diploma in Statistics from Trinity College Dublin in 2005, and a PhD in Geography from Trinity College Dublin in 2011. His PhD thesis is entitled The Utility of the Irish Annals as a Source for the Reconstruction of Climate.
For more information, contact: Scott Stephenson at stephenson@uconn.edu