SECTION OF THE HISTORY OF MEDICINE
View from Havana Harbor, circa 1900.
My primary interest is the role of disease and public health in the history of Latin America and the Caribbean. Specifically, I concentrate on how diseases and responses to them shape relations of power between the peoples of the region and other actors in the international system. My most recent work focuses on the many ways that endemic yellow fever in Havana influenced Cubans' relationships with the United States during the latter decades of the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth. I am currently working on new research that broadens the study of the effects of disease on empire to other Caribbean contexts.
Book:
Epidemic Invasions: Yellow Fever and the Limits of Cuban Independence, 1878 Through the Early Republic. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009. Project awarded the 2007 Jack D. Pressman - Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Development Award by the American Association for the History of Medicine.
Recent Honors and Awards:
Morse Fellowship, Yale University Faculty of Arts and Sciences, 2011-2012.
Virginia and Derrick Sherman Emerging Scholar, University of North Carolina Wilmington, 2010.
Workshop:
Globalizing the History of Colonial Medicine and Public Health: Adding Latin America and the Caribbean. Yale University School of Medicine, April 15-16, 2011.