Ongoing Projects
My dissertation, "Laboratories of Consent: Vaccine Science in the Spanish Atlantic World, 1779-1840," addresses questions about medical consent and its colonial history. In theory, consent affirms bodily autonomy, holds scientific inquiry and clinical treatment accountable, and protects patients from exploitation. I study when and why it fails to do this, grounding feminist debates over the concept of consent and the consenting subject in a historical study of the world’s first vaccine. In 1804, the Spanish introduced the smallpox vaccine to its empire, along with royal orders that vaccination be voluntary and consent a natural right ceded to fathers. In Laboratories of Consent, I examine how families throughout the Spanish Atlantic World navigated this new technology, considering how a wide cast of colonial actors made sense of consent amidst anti-imperial and anti-slavery rebellion. Drawing from medical reports, legal texts, government correspondence, and newspapers, I explain that consent for some became contingent upon the disenfranchisement of others, namely orphaned children, indigenous families, and enslaved peoples, whom doctors relied upon to reproduce, test, and circulate the vaccine. I argue that medical consent worked to uphold colonial structures of power, showing how immunization became embedded in struggles over the abolition of slavery, parental rights, individual freedoms, and hierarchies challenged by the unrest of revolution. Such historization suggests why consent, as a form of colonial governance, frequently fails to serve minority populations, particularly women and patients of color. It prompts us to reconsider our medical ethics and its often-unreliable promise of care, bringing together histories of medicine and feminist and postcolonial science studies through questions of race, gender, and power.
My 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 refusal, troubling disaster as a lens of visibility in historical studies of black life and slavery.
My dissertation, "Laboratories of Consent: Vaccine Science in the Spanish Atlantic World, 1779-1840," addresses questions about medical consent and its colonial history. In theory, consent affirms bodily autonomy, holds scientific inquiry and clinical treatment accountable, and protects patients from exploitation. I study when and why it fails to do this, grounding feminist debates over the concept of consent and the consenting subject in a historical study of the world’s first vaccine. In 1804, the Spanish introduced the smallpox vaccine to its empire, along with royal orders that vaccination be voluntary and consent a natural right ceded to fathers. In Laboratories of Consent, I examine how families throughout the Spanish Atlantic World navigated this new technology, considering how a wide cast of colonial actors made sense of consent amidst anti-imperial and anti-slavery rebellion. Drawing from medical reports, legal texts, government correspondence, and newspapers, I explain that consent for some became contingent upon the disenfranchisement of others, namely orphaned children, indigenous families, and enslaved peoples, whom doctors relied upon to reproduce, test, and circulate the vaccine. I argue that medical consent worked to uphold colonial structures of power, showing how immunization became embedded in struggles over the abolition of slavery, parental rights, individual freedoms, and hierarchies challenged by the unrest of revolution. Such historization suggests why consent, as a form of colonial governance, frequently fails to serve minority populations, particularly women and patients of color. It prompts us to reconsider our medical ethics and its often-unreliable promise of care, bringing together histories of medicine and feminist and postcolonial science studies through questions of race, gender, and power.
My 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 refusal, troubling disaster as a lens of visibility in historical studies of black life and slavery.