https://www.kathrynolivarius.com/home daily 1.0 2025-08-11 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/617053ee912c9269fe3b38df/21601219-798b-4335-b575-575062278f9b/KO+Pic+1.jpg Home - Greetings! My name is Kathryn Olivarius, and I am an Associate Professor of American History at Stanford University, interested in slavery, capitalism, and disease. Before moving to California, I received my doctorate in History from the University of Oxford and was a Past and Present postdoc at the University of London. My writing and research have appeared in multiple publications, including the New York Times and the American Historical Review. My first book, Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom (Harvard University Press, 2022) concerns yellow fever, immunity, and inequality in the nineteenth-century South. It won the 2023 Frederick Jackson Turner Award for the Best First Book in American History from the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association’s Prize in American History, given biennially for the best first or second book in American history (formerly the Dunning Prize). I am a 2024 recipient of the Dan David Prize, the world’s largest prize for practitioners studying the human past. I am a series editor for “American Beginnings, 1500-1900” at the University of Chicago Press. https://www.kathrynolivarius.com/new-page-1 daily 0.75 2025-11-11 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/617053ee912c9269fe3b38df/1639167647035-PB08ZLOCZ05C9JIOFHP0/Screen+Shot+2021-12-09+at+2.37.42+PM.png Teaching https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/617053ee912c9269fe3b38df/1639167675726-8GN3UAK3CNEAFWCD0M9R/Screen+Shot+2021-12-09+at+2.24.06+PM.png Teaching https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/617053ee912c9269fe3b38df/1639167755541-L78J4M7O07F7VG820PIX/Screen+Shot+2021-12-09+at+12.01.17+PM.png Teaching https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/617053ee912c9269fe3b38df/1639167876124-54ME87KM2T332G519462/Screen+Shot+2021-12-09+at+11.56.03+AM.png Teaching https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/617053ee912c9269fe3b38df/1639167975220-ZUX5XSK4BVH07Z9KNMYI/Screen+Shot+2021-12-09+at+11.56.34+AM.png Teaching https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/617053ee912c9269fe3b38df/1639168062352-C4E0J25Y70P8FFXHELMD/Screen%2BShot%2B2021-12-09%2Bat%2B2.17.58%2BPM.jpg Teaching https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/617053ee912c9269fe3b38df/daaa1498-79b3-4303-8d16-cb01fc51abee/Screenshot+2025-02-11+at+3.32.05%E2%80%AFPM.png Teaching https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/617053ee912c9269fe3b38df/12e9bf5b-a638-43a8-ac59-abaad7c6ab57/YF+torrid+zone.png Teaching https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/617053ee912c9269fe3b38df/14ae748e-3767-49a8-8d56-6a805b074820/Slide1.jpeg Teaching https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/617053ee912c9269fe3b38df/5f50532f-5385-4c9b-9a26-6908c50941e9/map.jpg Teaching https://www.kathrynolivarius.com/new-page daily 0.75 2024-08-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/617053ee912c9269fe3b38df/28b255b0-ab6f-4855-8933-d29b1956da25/Screen+Shot+2021-09-21+at+8.39.51+PM.png Necropolis - Necropolis Antebellum New Orleans sat at the heart of America’s slave and cotton kingdoms. It was also where yellow fever epidemics killed as many as 150,000 people during the nineteenth century. With little understanding of mosquito-borne viruses―and meager public health infrastructure―a person’s only protection against the scourge was to “get acclimated” by surviving the disease. About half of those who contracted yellow fever died. Repeated epidemics bolstered New Orleans’s strict racial hierarchy by introducing another hierarchy, what I term “immunocapital.” White survivors could leverage their immunity as evidence that they had paid their biological dues and could then pursue economic and political advancement. For enslaved Black people, the story was different. Immunity protected them from yellow fever, but as embodied capital, they saw the social and monetary value of their acclimation accrue to their white owners. Whereas immunity conferred opportunity and privilege on whites, it relegated enslaved people to the most grueling labor. The question of good health―who has it, who doesn’t, and why―is always in part political. Necropolis shows how powerful nineteenth-century white Orleanians―all allegedly immune―pushed this politics to the extreme. They constructed a society that capitalized mortal risk and equated perceived immunity with creditworthiness and reliability. Instead of trying to curb yellow fever through sanitation or quarantines, immune white Orleanians took advantage of the chaos disease caused. Immunological discrimination therefore became one more form of bias in a society premised on inequality, one more channel by which capital disciplined and divided the population. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/617053ee912c9269fe3b38df/cfee6b61-3638-499c-8952-3bd4260770b4/IMG_0791.jpeg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ec321c2af33de48734cc929/1618497259178-6XJGK9GR6YAVBQL5L519/20140301_Trade-151_012-2.jpg Necropolis https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ec321c2af33de48734cc929/1607694583486-2PQT0LQ193RL7MCB6DX4/20140228_Trade+151_0046.jpg Necropolis https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ec321c2af33de48734cc929/1607694644871-IC85FNH781UNZSZEGHDR/Aro+Ha_0428.jpg Necropolis https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ec321c2af33de48734cc929/1607638148090-Y6OFDI575CM3NQV732RJ/Large+JPG-Aro+Ha_0387.jpg Necropolis https://www.kathrynolivarius.com/research daily 0.75 2025-07-18 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/617053ee912c9269fe3b38df/918f0d15-bee9-4f8b-b6b4-7c4d3da39b5a/default.jpg Research How We Died: Public and Private Health in Early America, William and Mary Quarterly (2024) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/617053ee912c9269fe3b38df/90a1c163-ba28-4838-8c88-fec8746f4c51/8164264.jpg Research “Death, Data, and Denial in Antebellum New Orleans,” Harvard Library Bulletin (2021) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/617053ee912c9269fe3b38df/ab883600-9ccd-4ec9-9f0e-7679f9bea63a/12olivarius-superJumbo.jpeg Research The Dangerous History of Immunoprivilege, New York Times (2020) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/617053ee912c9269fe3b38df/139afb1b-9236-4bb1-a485-79512b29d505/m_rhz176f1.jpeg Research Immunity, Capital, and Power in Antebellum New Orleans, American Historical Review (2019) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/617053ee912c9269fe3b38df/1686585023283-U4VSJZ3MGNK3ZX9KQ22A/syph.jpg Research Super-spreader: Syphilis, Shame, and the Civil War (article in preparation) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/617053ee912c9269fe3b38df/1a518433-877e-43d8-be56-dc1ad192a9af/Image+3+%28Waud%29.jpg Research “Immunocapital,” basis of special issue in Exertions from the Society for the Anthropology of Work (2023) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/617053ee912c9269fe3b38df/0f42d7ed-f1e1-4806-ba64-056d0874f2bf/Screen+Shot+2021-09-21+at+8.39.51+PM.png Research Necropolis (2022), paperback (2024) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/617053ee912c9269fe3b38df/645f8e04-60a9-47b8-85fd-660d24fb84b3/Screen+Shot+2022-06-06+at+1.49.23+PM.png Research Digital supplement to “Immunity, Capital, and Power in Antebellum New Orleans” (2019) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/617053ee912c9269fe3b38df/15a9f023-af66-4916-80fb-9a0342be6296/climate+map+usa.png Research Bad Risk: Southerners, Climate, and Mortality in Antebellum American Life Insurance (in preparation) https://www.kathrynolivarius.com/contact daily 0.75 2021-12-10 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/617053ee912c9269fe3b38df/7fa44aa1-31ba-43ac-aaf8-95d843da5a8c/RobinsonAtlasVieuxCarre83.jpg Contact - Contact me koli [at] stanford [dot] edu 450 Jane Stanford Way Building 200 Stanford, CA 94305 Twitter Stanford Faculty Page