Dr. Martin Bauch is a historian of climate, environment, and disease in the premodern world at the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO) in Leipzig. His research integrates environmental history, climate history, and the critical analysis of written sources to examine how climatic variability, extreme events, and epidemics shaped social, political, and economic developments in medieval Europe.

His core expertise lies in the socio-cultural history of climate and disease in the Middle Ages, combined with reconstructionist approaches developed through interdisciplinary collaboration. Drawing on narrative, administrative, and normative sources, he contributes to the reconstruction of past climates and epidemic outbreaks and situates these within broader patterns of premodern global environmental change. By embedding European phenomena in wider spatial and temporal frameworks, his work advances a global perspective on medieval environmental and disease history.

Bauch’s research further engages with the history of medieval infrastructures, famines, and grain trade, as well as with questions of sacrality, rulership, and religious practice, including pilgrimage and the veneration of saints and relics. These thematic intersections allow him to explore how environmental stress and epidemic crises interacted with political authority, economic systems, and religious cultures.

Geographically, his scholarship focuses on Central and Southern Europe, particularly Germany, Bohemia, and Italy, while increasingly contributing to premodern global history through the lens of environmental change and societal teleconnections. He is also active in the Digital Humanities and participates in collaborative data-driven projects, including the Semantic MediaWiki-based platform for medieval epidemic data, epimeddat.net.