Ongoing Projects
My dissertation project—Brazo-a-Brazo: Humanitarian Medicine and the Preservation of Empire—examines immunization as it took shape in the Iberian Atlantic World. Immunization is a contested practice that compels extreme positions and inspires difficult questions about the ethics of preventative technology and the social and moral obligations physicians, governments, and citizens have to one another. Why do families choose to vaccinate? Who actually has the right to choose? My research addresses such questions through an analysis of epidemic response across communities in Mexico and Cuba.
By examining debates between practitioners engaged in vaccination, alongside their encounters and interactions with patients, my research shows how and why consent became central to the project of immunization. In doing so, I show how concepts and practices of immunity shifted through critical moments in the colonial and revolutionary history of the Americas. I ask how beliefs and conflicts over the healthy body shaped preventative care, addressing how medicine was fashioned into a moral responsibility, fostering new obligations to one’s family and community. By tracing the circulation of vaccine across the gulf world, I demonstrate how patients and their families responded to and even sought out such interventions to make sense of impending disease. Conflicts over such issues as medical consent, parental authority, and human rights, I argue, became crucial to the success of vaccine propagation. Tracing these lived encounters through key episodes, I show how such concerns shaped the direction of public health initiatives, as vaccination supplemented quarantine and was deployed in new ways against mystery illnesses and notable plagues such as yellow fever. The deployment of immunization, I argue, cannot be understood simply as a means of preventing and controlling epidemic infection. Rather, it reveals how the preservation of human life, through aid and health intervention, sustained and justified imperial control of environments and bodies, as voluntary immunization was implemented and imagined as key to the preservation of empire.
I am also working on two additional projects that explore the role of indigenous knowledge and native documents in 19th century epidemiology (especially of yellow fever); and the history of atlantic midwives and their exchange of reproductive health knowledges during the Seven Years War.
My dissertation project—Brazo-a-Brazo: Humanitarian Medicine and the Preservation of Empire—examines immunization as it took shape in the Iberian Atlantic World. Immunization is a contested practice that compels extreme positions and inspires difficult questions about the ethics of preventative technology and the social and moral obligations physicians, governments, and citizens have to one another. Why do families choose to vaccinate? Who actually has the right to choose? My research addresses such questions through an analysis of epidemic response across communities in Mexico and Cuba.
By examining debates between practitioners engaged in vaccination, alongside their encounters and interactions with patients, my research shows how and why consent became central to the project of immunization. In doing so, I show how concepts and practices of immunity shifted through critical moments in the colonial and revolutionary history of the Americas. I ask how beliefs and conflicts over the healthy body shaped preventative care, addressing how medicine was fashioned into a moral responsibility, fostering new obligations to one’s family and community. By tracing the circulation of vaccine across the gulf world, I demonstrate how patients and their families responded to and even sought out such interventions to make sense of impending disease. Conflicts over such issues as medical consent, parental authority, and human rights, I argue, became crucial to the success of vaccine propagation. Tracing these lived encounters through key episodes, I show how such concerns shaped the direction of public health initiatives, as vaccination supplemented quarantine and was deployed in new ways against mystery illnesses and notable plagues such as yellow fever. The deployment of immunization, I argue, cannot be understood simply as a means of preventing and controlling epidemic infection. Rather, it reveals how the preservation of human life, through aid and health intervention, sustained and justified imperial control of environments and bodies, as voluntary immunization was implemented and imagined as key to the preservation of empire.
I am also working on two additional projects that explore the role of indigenous knowledge and native documents in 19th century epidemiology (especially of yellow fever); and the history of atlantic midwives and their exchange of reproductive health knowledges during the Seven Years War.