Rate My Professor Samuel Cohn

Samuel Cohn is Professor of Medieval History in the School of Humanities at the University of Glasgow, a position he has held since 1995. He earned his PhD in Medieval History from Harvard University in 1978, his MA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1972, and his BA from Union College in 1971.

His scholarship centers on popular protest and insurrection in late medieval and early modern Europe and the history of plague and epidemics from antiquity to the present. Key publications include Epidemics: Hate and Compassion from the Plague of Athens to AIDS (Oxford University Press, 2018), Popular Protest in Late Medieval English Towns (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Cultures of Plague: Medical Thinking at the End of the Renaissance (Oxford University Press, 2010), Lust for Liberty: The Politics of Social Revolt in Medieval Europe, 1200-1425 (Harvard University Press, 2006), The Black Death Transformed: Disease and Culture in Early Renaissance Europe (Arnold, 2002), Paradoxes of Inequality in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge University Press, 2021), and Popular Protest and Ideals of Democracy in Late Renaissance Italy (Oxford University Press, 2022). Cohn has received major grants including a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship (2014-2017), an ERC Advanced Grant continued by UKRI for 'Art & Inequality in the Shadow of the Black Death' (2022-2027), and participation in the ERC Synergy Grant 'Synergy-Plague' (2024-2030). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2015-), Honorary Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, and has held visiting professorships at UC Berkeley, the American Academy in Rome, EHESS Paris, and other institutions. His interdisciplinary work collaborates with medical anthropologists, geneticists, and climatologists on plague ecology and social responses to disease. Cohn supervises PhD theses on leprosy, venereal diseases, art post-Black Death, and medieval Italian networks, and delivers keynote lectures internationally on epidemics, inequality, and revolt.