Broadly trained as a scholar of Latin America and the Caribbean, my research and teaching focus on gender studies and the history of public health and medicine. I earned my PhD in history from Duke University this spring (2020), and before that, I obtained my M.A.in Latin American Studies from Tulane University and B.A. in Anthropology from the University of Florida. As a historian of medicine, I study how families navigate healthcare decisions and how racial and gender disparities intersect to create health inequity.
This is the subject of my book project, Atlantic Antidote: Race, Gender, and the Birth of the First Vaccine, a history of vaccination and family rights 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. Yet archival research reveals that doctors relied 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. 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.
I am thrilled to have the opportunity to think through this research as a Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies postdoctoral associate in the Humanities Unbounded Lab, “Revaluing Care in the Global Economy” (RCGE). As part of the lab, I will be organizing public workshops, including one we have already hosted on the ethics of developing and distributing a COVID-19 vaccine. I hope to build on this conversation this spring through a series of events focused on rethinking global health, the politics of vaccination, and vaccine skepticism. Through the RCGE, I am also a mentor for an undergraduate research team working on the Global Care Policy Index, an international and interdisciplinary project based out of Yale-NUS that analyzes social policies related to care labor throughout the world. I look forward to working closely with Duke undergraduates on this project, as well teaching “Gender and Everyday Life” this spring.