Sarah Weill-Jones ’26 has long been interested in what disease reveals about the societies it affects, and not just clinically. A classical cultures and society major with a minor in health studies, Weill-Jones had previously researched the Plague of Athens, but for their senior thesis, they wanted to go much deeper.
“From Justinian to Billy Graham: Politicizing Plague in Antiquity and the Modern Era” traces how authority figures across centuries have used epidemics as a tool of political and religious control. Weill-Jones’ work draws a throughline between two moments separated by nearly 1,500 years: the reign of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian during the first outbreak of the Black Death, and the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s.
In both cases, Weill-Jones says, authority figures blamed gay people for the onset of disease, leveraging the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah to frame plague as divine punishment for their behavior. Justinian wielded rhetoric to suppress political dissent after a period of rioting and unrest, while modern-day preachers like Billy Graham deployed it to push back against civil rights and sexual liberation movements, they say. The consequences were devastating in both cases, leaving thousands of gay people dead and entire communities ostracized.
“My biggest takeaway from the project was that deviancy, in many different forms, threatens both religious and political figures across centuries,” Weill-Jones says. “Though punishments may differ, the persecution perceived deviants suffer ostracizes them for millennia.”
Weill-Jones’s advisor, Associate Professor and Chair of Classics Matthew Farmer, met with them weekly throughout the process, suggesting sources and helping develop the project’s analytical framework. Research and Instruction Librarian Paul Turner also provided assistance along the way. Weill-Jones also credits their friends, particularly those outside classics, as essential sounding boards, which ensured their work remained accessible to all readers.
The thesis reshaped Weill-Jones’s understanding of how history functions. They initially assumed that 1980s preachers had unknowingly echoed Justinian’s actions, an act of history repeating itself. But the research led them to a more unsettling conclusion: bad actors may deliberately study the past to search for persecution strategies. “History can act not just as a lesson for what one mustn’t do,” Weill-Jones says, “but for bad actors, it can be a lesson in how to persecute.”
Weill-Jones will take that insight into a legal career focused on public-interest work. After graduation, they plan to serve as an ADA compliance and accessibility consultant for Birnbaum Interpreting Services, as director of disability justice and accessibility for the New York City nonprofit Mentor A Promise, and as an immigration paralegal at Klasko Immigration Law Partners. Later, Weill-Jones plans to pursue law school and focus on serving disabled individuals.
Their background in Latin, and the knowledge that many American laws targeting queer populations are rooted in ancient history, feels directly relevant as they step away from the College. “I believe that there is always more to learn from antiquity, and I intend to use that knowledge as my basis for how I continue to move through the world,” Weill-Jones says.