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.
Manuscript:
Epidemic Invasions: Yellow Fever and the Limits of Cuban Independence, 1878 Through the Early Republic. Project awarded the 2007 Jack D. Pressman – Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Development Award by the American Association for the History of Medicine. Forthcoming, Fall 2009, The University of Chicago Press.
Recent Scholarship:
“A Fever For Empire: U.S. Disease Eradication in Cuba As Colonial Public Health,” in Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco Scarano, ed., Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern U.S. State, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009.
“The Invincible Generals: Disease and the Fight for Empire in Cuba, 1868 to 1898,” in Poonam Bala, ed., Contested Site: Some Revelations in Imperial Context, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield (Lexington Books), 2009.
"The Threat from Havana: Southern Public Health, Yellow Fever, and U.S. Intervention in the Cuban Struggle for Independence, 1878-1898," Journal of Southern History 72:3 (2006); 541-568. View via EBSCOhost (account required).
Office hours at Faner 3268: on leave 2009-2010 academic year.
C.V.
View from Havana Harbor, circa 1900.