Research

Faculty Research

Violence and Risk in Medieval Iceland: This Spattered Isle: New Book by Professor Oren Falk

Oren Falk's book and research considers the medieval Icelandic sagas as case studies in the violence general to the human experience, arguing that violence, “both perennial and contemporary,” serves as a technique for dealing with uncertainty....

In this book, the Icelandic case studies elaborated reveal the historically specific ways in which such general truisms get acted out in a particular culture. Successive chapters move from the individual level of struggling to survive and assert dominance in a feud, through the sociological level of creating and upholding institutions that will serve elites’ agendas, to the existential level of coming to grips with the harsh environment Icelanders faced, a sputtering volcanic outcrop stuck in the middle of a storm-tossed North Atlantic.

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Graduate Student Research

History & Science Research Synergize for Greater Understanding

The research of Kevin Bloomfield, a Ph.D. candidate in history, and colleagues, was recently honored with a publication in Climatic Change.

The paper, Beyond One-Way Determinism: San Frediano's Miracle and Climate Change in Central and Southern Italy in Late Antiquity, examines the cultural impacts of climate change in Italy during the first millennium by studying scientific data and historical records.

Undergraduate Research

Ezra's Archives is a publication put forth annually by the Cornell Historical Society. The Cornell Historical Society (CHS) is an undergraduate organization at Cornell University founded in 2010.  CHS educates and fosters appreciation for historical topics and methodology with the undergraduate student population and the community at large.   This journal, launched in the Spring of 2011, showcases stellar examples of undergraduate research in the field of history.  In 2021, Ezra's Archives was published online and articles can be read in this and previous issues on  e-Commons.