Talking Humanities

ABOUT THIS EPISODE

Our conversation is about law and the humanities. It asks what happens when we approach law not just as rules and institutions, but through literature, history and human experience — whose voices are heard, whose are missing, and how people live with the consequences of legal power.

GUESTS

Dr Maryam Mirza, Associate Professor of South Asian Literature, Durham University
Staff profile: https://www.durham.ac.uk/staff/maryam-mirza/

Professor Tom Hamilton, Associate Professor and Director of Research, Department of History, Durham University
Staff profile: https://www.durham.ac.uk/staff/tom-b-hamilton/

Tom's book: A Widow's Vengeance After the Wars of Religion
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/a-widows-vengeance-after-the-wars-of-religion-9780197929995?lang=en&cc=gb

REFERENCES

Bhattacharya, Santanu. Deviants. Penguin, 2025.

Manto, Saadat Hasan. "The New Law." Translated by Maryam Mirza and T.H. Mirza. Bombay Literary Magazine, 2025.
https://bombaylitmag.com/contribution/maryam-mirza-and-tariq-mirza-issue-61/

Massey, Sujata. The Widows of Malabar Hill. Soho Crime, 2018.

Siddique, Osama. Pakistan's Experience with Formal Law: An Alien Justice. Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Sircar, Oishik. "Spectacles of Emancipation: Reading Rights Differently in India's Legal Discourse." Osgoode Hall Law Journal, vol. 49, no. 3, Spring 2012, pp. 527–574.

White, James Boyd. "Telling Stories in the Law and in Ordinary Life: The Oresteia and 'Noon Wine'." Heracles' Bow: Essays on the Rhetoric and Poetics of the Law. University of Wisconsin Press, 1985, pp. 168–91.

Aeneas article (Nature, 2025): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09292-5

Predicting the Past free online interface: https://predictingthepast.com/ (with links to the teaching syllabus and code base)

Aeneas release blogpost: https://deepmind.google/blog/aeneas-transforms-how-historians-connect-the-past/

Birthday Invitation of Sulpicia Lepidina, one of the earliest known examples of writing in Latin by a woman: https://romaninscriptionsofbritain.org/inscriptions/TabVindol291

Classics and Ancient History at Durham: https://www.durham.ac.uk/departments/academic/classics-ancient-history/

Digital Humanities and Classics at Durham: https://digitalhumanities.webspace.durham.ac.uk/

TechUPWomen: https://www.techup.ac.uk/

TechUPWomen "How far we've come" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiq4_1N0DjU

AI and Ethics paper: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43681-024-00641-0

A visit to St Paul’s Church, Jarrow, to hear how Rivers of Ink reimagines the Codex Amiatinus through projection, sound, and scholarship.

Find out more about Transformative Humanities

Our guests:

Dr Nikita Chiu

Dr Chris Cowie

Dr Vladimir Brljak

Find out more about Transformative Humanties.

Please visit the website for the walking trail: 

https://durhams-black-history.humap.site/

Link for Sean Creighton and also relevant media links: 

https://durhams-black-history.humap.site/about

Link to Durham's Palatinate Newspaper:  https://www.palatinate.org.uk

Overview:

The Black Death of 1348–9 stands “unchallenged as the greatest disaster in documented human history,” yet the characteristics of the disease that killed approximately half the population of Europe in just a handful of years have long confounded academics. Although largely thought to be caused by Yersinia pestis, it is still unclear how the disease spread so quickly in a preindustrial society. 

The project uses the latest computer modelling, originally developed in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, to simulate the spread of the Black Death in England. The JUNE model applies modern census data about the population and a range of information about daily life – such as work patterns, travel, and social activities – to simulate the spread of disease. This is how traditional disease modelling works: with sufficient information about a population and their behaviour, alongside information about the characteristics of a disease, it is possible to project potential future outcomes and put mitigation policies in place to limit the spread.

This project inverts that logic by using the best knowledge of late medieval society to project plausible pathological pasts and determine the most likely way the disease spread. Drawing on historical and archaeological sources, the model reconstructs the broad characteristics of the late medieval population on the eve of the Black Death, such as location, age, sex, and occupation. This forms the “static” part of the model. From there, the team infers “dynamic” behavioural patterns, such as where people spent their time and whom they encountered in their daily lives. 

The primary objectives are to establish how the Black Death spread, the likely means of its transmission, and what this reveals about social connections in medieval society. The model can test for multiple modes of transmission: one direct, through human-to-human contact, where either infected fleas from carriers are transferred to uninfected people, or where close contact allows transmission through coughing; and one indirect, where infected fleas remain at a place and establish a “disease reservoir.”

Through this work, the project aims to shed new light on the disease itself and the extent to which it was spread by human interactions, as well as on the social connectivity of late medieval society by identifying how people likely interacted with one another during one of the worst pandemics in global history.

To find out more about the project please visit: https://modellingtheblackdeath.wordpress.com

Participants in the conversation:

Dr Alex Brown, Associate Professor of Medieval History, Durham University

Dr Grace Owen, Postdoctoral Research Associate, History, Durham University

Barney Sloane FSA, Independent Researcher, Oxfordshire

Prof Frank Krauss, Professor for Particle Theory, Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology, Durham University

Professor Ifan Hughes, Head of the Quantum Light and Matter research group, Physics, Durham University

Callum M. Brown. MPhys, Research Assistant for the Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology, Durham University

Dr Martha Correa-Delval, Research Software Engineer, Durham University

A map of the full Coal Stories route can be found here. 

For the podcast we walked from Market Place (13 on map)) past St Mary-le-Bow Church (1) and down to the coal seam (2).

You can find the guide at the following shops:

• Palace Green Library shop
• Durham Cathedral shop
• Beamish Museum Shop

Or you can email [email protected] to request a copy of the book.