​Ongoing Projects

My current book project, Atlantic Antidote: Race, Gender, and the Birth of the First Vaccine, is a history of vaccination and family politics in the age of revolution. It follows the 1804 introduction of the smallpox vaccine into the Atlantic World and centers on the Spanish Empire, where according to royal orders, vaccination was voluntary and consent a natural right ceded to parents. Despite these protections, doctors came to rely on enslaved, indigenous, and other dispossessed bodies to conserve and physically reproduce the vaccine for those otherwise accorded the right to consent. Analyzing this polemic and the politicization of preventative health, Atlantic Antidote traces the vaccine through the greater Caribbean to ask why Spanish authorities protected voluntary vaccination, what this choice meant for parents and patients, and what their stories can tell us about the value of consent in an era of both race and rights-making. 

I argue that consent, as it was envisioned and employed in vaccination policies, worked to uphold colonial structures of power, showing how immunization became embedded in struggles over the abolition of slavery, parental rights, and hierarchies challenged by the unrest of revolution. Archival materials reveal that recognition of rights was inconsistently determined by elite assumptions about reason and bodily difference. Racial and sexual politics informed decisions about which bodies were best suited to incubate and test the vaccine, whose knowledge was deemed a threat to public health, and ultimately, who should be recognized as a parent, capable of childrearing and competent enough to consent.​ By attending to these relations, the project underscores the centrality of reproductive politics to the creation and maintenance of the vaccine, and with it, the imperial designs of political leaders who hoped to wield it as a new power over life and death.

​In turn, the project reflects on our own reliance on vaccines to curtail disease and suggests how this technology can distract from the social and economic conditions that disproportionately create health risks in the first place.

​​​A second project, a microhistory of the 1833 cholera epidemic in Havana, builds out of questions posed in my dissertation about medicine and empire. Relatively unknown before 1817, cholera prompted dramatic quarantines and policies that threatened the lives and communities built by enslaved peoples. But it also led slaveholders to abandon their property, leaving the enslaved to fend for themselves, and, for some, escape. In an era of uncertain imperial rule, cholera disrupted elites’ attempts to separate and confine the enslaved from abolitionist and anti-colonial influence. Tracing enslaved families born and bought in Havana, the book will foreground the unexpected effects of epidemic disease, asking what cholera can tell us about not only on the changing racial assumptions that characterized slavery at this time but also the intra-colonial slave trade that developed in response to the abolitionist movement. It will do so primarily through the lens of a single plantation—the Loreto, owned and operated by the widow Señora Doña Mariana Alfaro. This approach takes up a series of questions posed by black studies scholars: first, about the gender and racial dynamics of female slave owners; and secondly, about disaster and ecology, asking how people's natural environments help shape their specific struggles and claims to liberation.

The cholera project incorporates a digital component, mapping and building a database of burials in the wake of the epidemic. In addition, it will feature slave cemeteries located elsewhere in Latin America and the Caribbean, including Spanish Florida; images of excavated material culture; and information about genetic data and subsequent findings gathered from ongoing archaeological work. As a resource for students and researchers, the website will serve to prompt new ways of thinking and doing the history of slavery with and beyond documentary archives but also questions about memory, preservation, and care.