Monica H. Green specializes in the Global History of Health and Medieval European History, particularly the history of medicine and the history of gender. Her innovative teaching - including stints as guest faculty at the University of Utrecht (2007) and the University of Seattle (2013) - earned her the 2014 Hazen Education Prize from the History of Science Society. In the summer of 2009 and 2012, she directed the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Seminar for college and university teachers on "Health and Disease in the Middle Ages" at the Wellcome Library in London. In summer 2013, she was visiting fellow at the Center for Medieval Studies at Fordham University. In 2013-14, she was one of three ASU faculty who were selected as members of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

In spring 2015, she taught her course on the Black Death. It was out of concern how to teach the most severe pandemic in human history that she was prompted to engage in an extended interdisciplinary dialogue among researchers working on plague. That work came to fruition in the inaugural volume of a new journal, The Medieval Globe. Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death gathers together historians, anthropologists, and biologists to explore how the new sciences of plague, particularly genetics, can combine with humanistic approaches to create a new understanding of this globally distributed disease. (And yes, we have it here in Arizona!) Funding for the open-access publication of the volume was made possible by a generous grant from the World History Center of the University of Pittsburgh. The volume was the focus of an interdisciplinary symposium held at the University of Illinois on 29 Jan. 2015: The Black Death and Beyond: New Research at the Intersection of Science and the Humanities. And one of the essays, which corrects the "misdiagnosis" of an image thought to represent plague (it actually shows leprosy), has been written up as an example of digital scholarship on Wikipedia and has already effected a change in uses of the image on the Internet. Green has also published recently on plague's history in Lancet Infectious Diseases, and spoke on the topic again at a symposium at Rutgers University, Commerce and Contagion: Vectors Through Time and Space on 4 February 2015.

Green's teaching in the field of Global History of Health has led her further to explore the points of intersection between history and the historicist sciences. Green suggests in the December 2014 issue of the American Historical Association's Perspectives on History that the evolutionary histories embedded in genetics, which have thoroughly transformed plague studies, may be fruitful in pursuing other kinds of history. In 2012 she published an essay in The Ashgate Research Companion to the Globalization of Health (ed. Ted Schrecker) on the importance of including historical perspectives in present-day discussions of Global Health. Most recently, she has been gathering teaching materials on the 2014 West African Ebola crisis.

Prior to this latest work, Green had published over 120 studies and reviews on various aspects of medical history in premodern Europe. Among her major publications on the history of women's healthcare are Women's Healthcare in the Medieval West: Texts and Contexts (2000), which was co-winner of the 2004 John Nicholas Brown Prize from the Medieval Academy of America for the best first book in medieval studies; The Trotula: A Medieval Compendium of Women's Medicine (2001); and Making Women's Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-Modern Gynaecology (Oxford, 2008), which was awarded the 2009 Margaret W. Rossiter Prize for the best book on the history of women in science by the History of Science Society. Her essay documenting the medieval sources of the most popular early modern text of women's medicine, the Rosengarten of Eucharius Rösslin, was selected as a "Highlight of the Decade" by the journal Medical History.

Besides surveying the entire corpus of medieval European gynecological literature, she has reconstructed the oeuvre of Trota (or Trocta) of Salerno, the early 12th-century female medical writer who has been the object of much mythologizing; published the case of a Jewish midwife tried for the death of a woman who died under her care in 1403; and argued for the need to rethink modern narratives of the history of midwives and other aspects of women's health concerns.

In 2009, Green published an overview of the state of medieval medical history, arguing that the field has now become a vital subdiscipline of medieval history: "Integrative Medicine: Incorporating Medicine and Health into the Canon of Medieval European History". Her comprehensive "Bibliography on Medieval Women, Gender, and Medicine, 1980-2009" appeared in 2010 and can be found free online. Among her recent publications is a study of the circulation of the Cordoban physician al-Zahrawi's Surgery in medieval Europe, a survey of Latin medical sources for the history of maternity in medieval England, and an essay "Caring for Gendered Bodies".

One focal point of her current work are the medical translations from the Arabic made by the 11th-century monk, Constantine the African, and the larger cultural context of the revolutionary changes in western medicine in the 12th century. In collaboration with Florence Eliza Glaze (Coastal Carolina University) and several other scholars, she is assembling a comprehensive database of all Latin medical manuscripts from c. 1075 to c. 1225. A brief description of the project can be found on p. 11 of the Fall 2012 issue of Manuscripts on My Mind. Together with Kathleen Walker-Meikle and with the initial support of the Mellon Foundation, she is undertaking an edition of the Antidotarium magnum, an 11th-century compendium fusing Latin, Greek, and Arabic medical traditions. In February 2015, she gave a lecture and workshops on the medical manuscripts at Harvard's libraries: "Reconstructing Medieval Medical Libraries: Between the Codex and the Computer." In March 2015, she participated in a symposium on the history of the book in 12th-century Europe at the University of Leiden.

Green has served on the councils of the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship, the American Association for the History of Medicine, and the Medieval Academy of America. She also serves on the editorial boards of Dynamis and History Compass. She is the founder and list manager for MEDMED-L, a discussion group for scholars interested in aspects of pre-modern medicine, particularly in the Middle Ages.

In previous years, she has held fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, NJ), the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (Harvard), the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and All Souls College, Oxford.  

Teaching Interests and Courses

Monica Green teaches a variety of courses in several areas of specialization: Global History of Health, Women's History, and Medieval European History. Her teaching philosophy is that History serves as an excellent medium in which to think about context and causation. She places heavy emphasis on teaching with primary sources, so that students can learn for themselves how to weigh evidence, formulate arguments, and (as often happens) teach her many things she had not yet realized about the past.

Undergraduate Courses
The Black Death: Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World (intensive research)
Global History of Health (lecture)
Sex and Society in the Middle Ages (lecture)
History of Women in Science and Medicine (lecture)
Race and Medicine:  Historical Perspectives (seminar)
Medieval Cities:  Walls, Wealth, and Welfare (seminar)
Before Columbus:  Western Views of the Non-Western World (seminar)

Graduate Courses
The Emergence of Global Health
Women’s Secrets in Latin and Dutch Traditions (taught in Utrecht, NL, 2007)
European Diversity, co-instructor
Women in Medieval Society
Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Women's Health