Current Projects

Morbid Geographies

Enslavement, Epidemics, and Embodiment in the Early Modern Atlantic World 

Morbid Geographies is a book project that uses the social and cultural history of smallpox as a lens for examining how enslaved Africans and their descendants experienced and contended with the consequences of the slave trade to the Caribbean region. The racial and gender ideologies engendered by colonization, slavery, and the slave trade placed enslaved Africans at risk of disease. I argue that disease manifested and materialized the aggregate consequences of enslavement and imperialism on the body, within social, spiritual, and geopolitical ties, and, ultimately, had an indelible impact on enslaved Africans’ voyages to and throughout the Americas. My work contributes to our holistic understanding of the Atlantic slave trades by centering Africans’ itinerant journeys, maritime quarantines, and re-embarkations as they traversed the Atlantic and made their ways to Spanish, Portuguese (Pará and Maranhão), French, and British island and coastal territories.

Morbid Geographies is under contract with Penn Press.

Smallpox and Slavery In the early modern atlantic world

A Digital History

Smallpox and Slavery in the Early Modern Atlantic World: A Digital History is a digital history project based on a qualitative research database of over 550 smallpox outbreaks that affected enslaved Africans and free people of African descent in the Atlantic World, with a focus on the Caribbean and West and West Central Africa, between the 1510s and 1830s. The project aims to offer historians the opportunity to examine the histories of outbreaks and epidemics across several regions, empires, and cultural contexts over 300 years, without losing sight of the millions of people who endured the brutality of the slave trade.

This project has received support from the Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective and the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton University.

Remedies and relations

Medicine, Slavery, and Freedom in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica

In the mid-eighteenth century, enslaved Africans in the ranching and agricultural community of St. Ann, Jamaica were more than likely treated by the Scottish doctor Alexander Johnson. The stories of their encounters with Johnston, the power dynamics therein, and their modes of kinship and community formation and community self-reliance despite the emerging British colonial medical regime are the subject of Remedies and Relations, a book project. Remedies and Relations examines how enslaved and free people of African descent accessed medical treatment for themselves and their children, the gendered formal and informal avenues of enslaved and free people’s medical training, and the diverse power dynamics that unfolded in the context of medical treatment. It is also concerned with the effects of both slavery and freedom on the bodies and social lives of children and adults of African descent, and how medical economies shaped kinship, the internal slave trade, and wealth distribution in eighteenth-century St. Ann, Jamaica.

This project has received support from the Library Company of Philadelphia/The Historical Society of Pennsylvania.