Kyle Harper is professor of classics and letters (and provost emeritus) at his alma mater, the University of Oklahoma. He is a Roman historian whose work tries to bring the natural sciences into the study of the human past in order to deepen our understanding of the relationship between human societies and the environment.
Harper is the author of four books, including The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire (Princeton University Press, 2017), which has been translated into 12 languages. His most recent book, Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History (Princeton University Press, 2021), a sweeping global history of infectious disease from human origins to COVID-19, won a PROSE Award for best book in the history of science, medicine, and technology. Harper has held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and Dumbarton Oaks.
His project, “Humans and Biodiversity: A Deep History from Origins to Anthropocene,” is a history of the relationship between humans and other animals, ranging from the Ice Age to the Sixth Extinction. It highlights the ways that humanity’s success intimately depends upon other animals and traces the deep roots of the current biodiversity crisis.
https://www.kyleharper.net/
