​Ongoing Projects

​My dissertation, "Laboratories of Consent: Vaccine Science in the Spanish Atlantic World, 1779-1840," examines the colonial history of medical rights through a study of the world’s first vaccine. The Spanish introduced the smallpox vaccine to its empire in 1804, along with royal orders that vaccination be voluntary and consent a natural right ceded to parents. Yet, doctors came to rely on enslaved, indigenous, and other dispossessed bodies to conserve the vaccine for those otherwise accorded this "universal" right. Foregrounding these patients and their own knowledge about health and disease, Laboratories of Consent follows the vaccine through the Spanish Caribbean and Mexico to ask why imperial—and later, national—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 medical 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 medical 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, worthy of rights and capable of informed consent.​ This was the case even after independence. Mexico retained voluntary vaccination, but the medical rights of women and indigenous and afro-descendant citizens remained restricted by assumptions about culture and competence. By tracing the vaccine through the postcolonial era, my project addresses the enduring effects of colonialism across political discourses of liberalism and access to resources and care. Such historicization suggests the limits of consent and prompts a more ethical conceptualization of "informed refusal" that embraces and respects indigenous and other cultural articulations of bodily autonomy.

​​​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.