Entangled Catastrophes: Famine, Disease, and Governance in Late Eighteenth-Century Tunis

Entangled Catastrophes: Famine, Disease, and Governance in Late Eighteenth-Century Tunis

Speaker: Lama Elsharif, 2025-26 MHC Postdoctoral Fellow

Respondent: Jessica Marglin

Lama Elsharif is a historian of the early modern and modern Middle East and North Africa whose work rethinks Mediterranean history from the perspective of Ottoman North Africa. Her research explores how the intersections of environmental crises, political instability, and shifting imperial dynamics shaped the region’s maritime practices and cross-regional entanglements. Drawing on North African, Ottoman, and European sources, her current book project, Small Wars of Scarcity: North African Corsairing in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries, examines how North African corsairing—often dismissed as opportunistic piracy—emerged as a state strategy for survival amid cascading droughts, famine, and epidemics. Lama received her PhD in History from Purdue University, where she was awarded the 2024 Distinguished Dissertation Award. Her work also received honorable mention for the 2024 Malcolm H. Kerr Dissertation Award from the Middle East Studies Association. Before joining the Mahindra Humanities Center, she was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Penn’s Wolf Humanities Center. Her writing has appeared in The Markaz Review, and she has contributed a chapter on Tunisian corsairing to an edited volume with the University of Amsterdam Press.

Jessica Marglin is Visiting Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. Her research examines the history of Jews in North Africa and the Mediterranean in the modern period, with a particular emphasis on law. She draws on sources in Arabic, Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, and multiple European languages.

Registration is required for this event.

About the Series

The Mahindra Humanities Center presents an Environmental Humanities seminar series with our 2025-26 postdoctoral fellows.