Date/Time
Thursday
3 Oct 2024
4:00 pm - 5:30 pm

Location
470 Stephens Hall

Event Type
Colloquium

Kathryn Olivarius
Assistant Professor of History, Stanford University

Antebellum New Orleans sat at the heart of America’s slave and cotton kingdoms. But it was also the nation’s “necropolis,” with epidemic yellow fever killing thousands each summer and leaving countless more orphaned, widowed, and bereaved. Olivarius shows how this city became stratified between the “acclimated” and “unacclimated”, why these immunity labels mattered, and how yellow fever was mobilized by white elites to further divide and exploit the population.

Kathryn Olivarius is an Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University. Olivarius is the 2024 recipient of the Dan David Prize, an honor conferred for distinguished contributions through innovative and impactful scholarship. Her research concerns disease, citizenship, and economics in the 19th century United States, though she teaches broadly on Atlantic slavery, the Age of Revolutions, and the social and cultural impacts of the American Civil War.

Olivarius earned her BA in history from Yale University in 2011. She received an MSt in U.S. History in 2013 and a DPhil in History in 2017 from the University of Oxford. Before joining the Stanford faculty, she was a Past and Present postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London.