Halil Burak Iri

Biography

Halil Burak Iri is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Notre Dame, where he works on late medieval Europe and the medieval Mediterranean. His dissertation, "Cascading Crises: France Between Collapse and Transformation, 1300–1364," argues that the disasters conventionally read as the crisis of the later Middle Ages instead remade French institutions. Famine, plague, war, environmental instability, and fiscal strain have long been gathered into a single narrative of inevitable decline — the death of a medieval world that had to pass before a new one could be born. He asks whether these were one crisis, many, or none at all, and whether their causes lay outside the system or within it. Each shock and the response to it, he contends, reshaped the conditions of the next, and the institutions caught in that sequence adapted more often than they failed. Regional in structure and comparative in reach, the project tests whether patterns of adaptation held under markedly uneven local conditions, using England as a counterpoint to identify what was distinctively French in the kingdom's response. It draws on historical archives such as fiscal registers and chronicles, together with natural archives of climate and disease reconstructed by the environmental sciences. Alongside the dissertation, he writes on crisis as a category of historical analysis and on the medieval Mediterranean as a space of exchange across religious and political boundaries. His research has been supported by the Nanovic Institute for European Studies. He holds a BA from Middle East Technical University (ODTÜ) and an MA from Notre Dame.