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Kathryn Meyer Olivarius
Associate Professor of History
I am an historian of the nineteenth-century United States, interested in the antebellum South, Greater Caribbean, slavery, capitalism, and disease. I am a 2024 recipient of the Dan David Prize, the world’s largest prize for practitioners studying the human past.
My first book, Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom (Harvard University Press, Belknap imprint, 2022) concerns yellow fever, immunity, and inequality . It received numerous awards, including the 2023 Frederick Jackson Turner Award for the Best First Book in American History from the Organization of American Historians, the 2023 Prize in American History from the American Historical Association (formerly the Dunning Prize), awarded biennially for the best first or second book in US history, and the 2023 Humanities Book of the Year Award from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities.
I am also interested in historical notions of consent (sexual or otherwise); syphilis and shame in the American Civil War and Gilded Age; slave revolts in the United States and the Caribbean; anti- and pro-slavery thought; class and ethnicity in antebellum America; the history of life insurance and environmental risk; comparative slave systems; technology and slavery; the Haitian Revolution; and boosterism in the American West.
Born and raised in New York, Washington D.C., and London, I earned my BA in history (cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) from Yale University in 2011. I received an MSt in US History (with distinction) in 2013 and a DPhil in History in 2017 from the University of Oxford. Before joining the Stanford faculty, I was a Past and Present postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London.
My first book, Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom (Harvard University Press, Belknap imprint, 2022) concerns yellow fever, immunity, and inequality . It received numerous awards, including the 2023 Frederick Jackson Turner Award for the Best First Book in American History from the Organization of American Historians, the 2023 Prize in American History from the American Historical Association (formerly the Dunning Prize), awarded biennially for the best first or second book in US history, and the 2023 Humanities Book of the Year Award from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities.
I am also interested in historical notions of consent (sexual or otherwise); syphilis and shame in the American Civil War and Gilded Age; slave revolts in the United States and the Caribbean; anti- and pro-slavery thought; class and ethnicity in antebellum America; the history of life insurance and environmental risk; comparative slave systems; technology and slavery; the Haitian Revolution; and boosterism in the American West.
Born and raised in New York, Washington D.C., and London, I earned my BA in history (cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) from Yale University in 2011. I received an MSt in US History (with distinction) in 2013 and a DPhil in History in 2017 from the University of Oxford. Before joining the Stanford faculty, I was a Past and Present postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London.