Kathryn Olivarius

Kathryn Olivarius is an Associate Professor of History at Stanford University, specializing in the School of Humanities and Sciences. She is a 2024 Dan David Prize laureate, the world’s largest history prize, for her groundbreaking work on disease, citizenship, and economics in the 19th-century U.S. Her research bridges slavery, capitalism, and epidemiology, focusing on the Antebellum South, Greater Caribbean, and the socio-political impacts of yellow fever and syphilis.

• Born in New York/Washington D.C./London
• BA, Yale University (2011, cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa)
• MSt and DPhil, University of Oxford (2013, 2017)
• Postdoctoral Fellow, Institute of Historical Research (University of London)

Her research interests include:

• Disease as a social and economic stratifier (e.g., yellow fever in New Orleans)
• Slavery, racial capitalism, and immunity hierarchies
• Historical consent, slave revolts, and proslavery ideology
• Comparative slave systems and the Haitian Revolution

In scientific awards, she has received:

• Dan David Prize (2024)
• Frederick Jackson Turner Award (2023)
• AHA Prize in American History (2023)
• Humanities Book of the Year Award (2023)

She advises doctoral students in U.S. history and teaches courses like Doing the History of Death and Disease and Graduate Research Seminars on 19th-century America.