Nükhet Varlık

Research Interests: Ottoman History; Early Modern Mediterranean Cultural History; History of Medicine and Public Health; History of Medicine and Science in the Islamicate World; Historical Epidemiology; Interdisciplinary Plague Studies; Environmental History; Medical Humanities; Death Studies; Digital Humanities

Nükhet Varlık is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University–Newark. Her research focuses on disease, death, medicine, and public health in the Ottoman Empire. Her first book, Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347–1600, is the first systematic scholarly study of the Ottoman experience of plague during the Black Death pandemic and the centuries that followed. It was awarded Middle East Studies Association’s 2016 Albert Hourani Book Award, the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association’s 2016 M. Fuat Köprülü Book Prize, the Society for the Medieval Mediterranean’s 2017 Dionisius A. Agius Prize, and the American Association for the History of Medicine’s 2018 George Rosen Prize. She is the editor of Plague and Contagion in the Islamic Mediterranean, a collection of articles on the social, cultural, and political responses to epidemics in the post-Black Death Islamic Mediterranean. Together with Lori Jones, Varlık is co-editor of Death and Disease in the Medieval and Early Modern World: Perspectives From Across the Mediterranean and Beyond (forthcoming).

Varlık has authored numerous articles and book chapters addressing different aspects of disease, death, and medicine in Ottoman society. Her new book project, Empire, Ecology, and Plague: Rethinking the Second Pandemic (ca.1340s–ca.1940s), examines the 600-year-old Ottoman plague experience in a global ecological context. In conjunction with this research, she gathers sources pertaining to the history of plague and contributes to the development of the Black Death Digital Archive. She is also involved in multidisciplinary research projects that incorporate perspectives from molecular genetics (ancient DNA research in particular), bioarchaeology, disease ecology, and climate science into historical inquiry.

Varlık’s research has been supported by the Institute for Advanced Study-Princeton, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, National Endowment for the Humanities, American Research Institute in Turkey, Koç University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations, and Turkish Cultural Foundation. From 2018 to 2022, she served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association. She is a member of the editorial board of Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, Osmanlı Bilimi Araştırmaları (Studies in Ottoman Science), and Journal of Research in the History of Science and Technology. Together with Ali Yaycıoğlu, Varlık serves as co-editor of Stanford Ottoman World Series: Critical Studies in Empire, Nature, and Knowledge. She is co-convener of History of Infectious Disease in the Islamicate World Working Group.

Her expertise on the history of pandemics is frequently sought out by the media internationally, especially since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. See below for her popular articles as well as media appearances and interviews, including in CNN, NPR, The Washington Post, Aljazeera, and Time.