Kathryn Meyer Olivarius
Associate Professor of History
Bio
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 my 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.
Academic Appointments
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Associate Professor, History
Program Affiliations
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American Studies
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Program in History & Philosophy of Science
Current Research and Scholarly Interests
I am an historian of nineteenth-century America, interested primarily in the antebellum South, Greater Caribbean, slavery, and disease. My research seeks to understand how epidemic yellow fever disrupted Deep Southern society. Nearly every summer, this mosquito-borne virus killed up to ten percent of the urban population. But it also generated culture and social norms in its fatal wake. Beyond the rigid structures of race and unfreedom in Deep Southern society, I argue there was alternate, if invisible, hierarchy at work, with “acclimated” (immune) people at the top and a great mass of “unacclimated” (non-immune) people awaiting their brush with yellow fever languishing in social and professional purgatory. About half of all people died in the acclimating process.
In New Orleans, alleged-imperviousness or vulnerability to epidemic disease evolved into an explanatory tool for success or failure in commodity capitalism, and a justification for a race- and ethnicity-based social hierarchy where certain people were decidedly less equal than others. Disease justified highly asymmetrical social and labor relations, produced politicians apathetic about the welfare of their poor or recently-immigrated constituents, and accentuated the population’s xenophobic, racist, pro-slavery, and individualist proclivities. Alongside skin color, acclimation-status, I argue, played a major role in determining a person’s position, success, and sense of belonging in antebellum New Orleans.
Most of all, disease provided the tacit justification for who did what work during cotton and sugar production, becoming the essence of an increasingly elaborate and tortuous justification for widespread and permanent black slavery. In the Deep Southern view, only enslaved black people could survive work like cane cutting, swamp clearing, and cotton picking. In fact, proslavery theorists argued, black slavery was positively natural, even humanitarian, for it protected the health of whites—and thus the nation writ large—insulating them from diseased-labor and spaces that would kill them.
By fusing health with capitalism in my forthcoming book Necropolis, I will present a new model—beyond the toxic fusion of white supremacy with the flows of global capitalism—for how power operated in Atlantic society.
I am also interested in historical notions of consent (sexual or otherwise); 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.
2024-25 Courses
- Doing the History of Death and Disease
HISTORY 200DE (Win) - Graduate Research Seminar: U.S. History in the 19th Century, Part I
HISTORY 468A (Win) - Graduate Research Seminar: U.S. History in the 19th Century, Part II
HISTORY 468B (Spr) - The Age of Revolution: America, France, and Haiti
AMSTUD 205K, HISTORY 205K, HISTORY 305K (Aut) - The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1830 to 1877
AMSTUD 155F, AMSTUD 55F, HISTORY 155F, HISTORY 55F (Aut) -
Independent Studies (7)
- Curricular Practical Training
HISTORY 299F (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Graduate Directed Reading
HISTORY 399W (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Graduate Research
HISTORY 499X (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Senior Research I
HISTORY 299A (Aut, Win, Spr) - Senior Research II
HISTORY 299B (Aut, Win, Spr) - Senior Research III
HISTORY 299C (Aut, Win, Spr) - Undergraduate Directed Research and Writing
HISTORY 299S (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum)
- Curricular Practical Training
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Prior Year Courses
2023-24 Courses
- The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1830 to 1877
AFRICAAM 55F, AMSTUD 155F, AMSTUD 55F, HISTORY 155F, HISTORY 55F (Aut)
2022-23 Courses
- Core in American History, Part IV
HISTORY 351D (Win) - Graduate Research Seminar: U.S. History in the 20th Century Part II
HISTORY 468B (Spr) - Nineteenth Century America
AFRICAAM 150B (Win) - Nineteenth Century America
AFRICAAM 50B (Win) - Nineteenth Century America
AMSTUD 150B, CSRE 150S (Win) - Nineteenth Century America
CSRE 50S (Win) - Nineteenth Century America
HISTORY 150B (Win) - Nineteenth Century America
HISTORY 50B (Win) - The History of 2022
HISTORY 1 (Aut)
2021-22 Courses
- The History of 2021
HISTORY 21 (Aut)
- The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1830 to 1877
Stanford Advisees
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Doctoral Dissertation Reader (AC)
Kristin McFadden, Magdalene Zier -
Orals Evaluator
Tanner Allread, Mariana Calvo, Aliyah Dunn-Salahuddin, Matt Randolph, Magdalene Zier -
Doctoral Dissertation Co-Advisor (AC)
Tanner Allread -
Doctoral (Program)
Tanner Allread, Marina Cassio
All Publications
- Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom Harvard University Press. 2022
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Immunity, Capital, and Power in Antebellum New Orleans
American Historical Review
2019; 124 (2): 425-455
View details for DOI 10.1093/ahr/rhz176
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The influence of vector-borne disease on human history: socio-ecological mechanisms.
Ecology letters
2021
Abstract
Vector-borne diseases (VBDs) are embedded within complex socio-ecological systems. While research has traditionally focused on the direct effects of VBDs on human morbidity and mortality, it is increasingly clear that their impacts are much more pervasive. VBDs are dynamically linked to feedbacks between environmental conditions, vector ecology, disease burden, and societal responses that drive transmission. As a result, VBDs have had profound influence on human history. Mechanisms include: (1) killing or debilitating large numbers of people, with demographic and population-level impacts; (2) differentially affecting populations based on prior history of disease exposure, immunity, and resistance; (3) being weaponised to promote or justify hierarchies of power, colonialism, racism, classism and sexism; (4) catalysing changes in ideas, institutions, infrastructure, technologies and social practices in efforts to control disease outbreaks; and (5) changing human relationships with the land and environment. We use historical and archaeological evidence interpreted through an ecological lens to illustrate how VBDs have shaped society and culture, focusing on case studies from four pertinent VBDs: plague, malaria, yellow fever and trypanosomiasis. By comparing across diseases, time periods and geographies, we highlight the enormous scope and variety of mechanisms by which VBDs have influenced human history.
View details for DOI 10.1111/ele.13675
View details for PubMedID 33501751
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Fugitivism: Escaping Slavery in the Lower Mississippi Valley, 1820-1860 (Book Review)
ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY
2020; 25 (2): 393–95
View details for DOI 10.1093/envhis/emz090
View details for Web of Science ID 000536475600013
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History from the Bottom Up and the Inside Out: Ethnicity, Race, and Identity in Working-Class History. (Book Review)
CANADIAN JOURNAL OF HISTORY-ANNALES CANADIENNES D HISTOIRE
2019; 54 (1-2): 273–74
View details for DOI 10.3138/cjh.54.1-2.11-br50
View details for Web of Science ID 000486224800060
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Making a Slave State: Political Development in Early South Carolina. (Book Review)
JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
2019; 85 (2): 416–18
View details for Web of Science ID 000466836200012