Monday, October 26, 2020
12:30 pm – 2:00 pm EDT
WebEx
We were pleased to invite you to a new webinar series, “Facing Inequality”, hosted by the Institute for International Economic Policy. This virtual series focused on current and emerging inequality issues in the U.S. and around the globe. The series brought attention to aspects of inequality being made increasingly relevant by the current COVID-19 pandemic and associated crises. The series was organized under the stewardship of IIEP Director James Foster, Oliver T. Carr, Jr. Professor of International Affairs and Professor of Economics, and IIEP Faculty Affiliate Trevor Jackson, Assistant Professor of History. The series was co-sponsored by the GW Interdisciplinary Inequality Series, co-organized by Prof. Jackson from the Department of History and Prof. Bryan Stuart from the Department of Economics.
This was the ninth event in the facing inequality series. Our distinguished guest was Dr. Kathryn Olivarius. Based on Olivarius’s current book project, this talk discussed the impact of yellow fever in New Orleans in the antebellum period and how disease and immunity became agents of inequality. Yellow fever killed upwards of eight percent of antebellum New Orleans’ population each summer. It was terrifying: there was do cure, no inoculation, no conclusive evidence of disease transmission, and no satisfactory proof for why it killed some while leaving others symptomatic. It was, moreover, a sudden and horrible way to die, with victims famously vomiting up thick black vomit at the end of their illness. About half of all nineteenth-century victims died; the other half became “acclimated” or immune for life. The Cotton Kingdom was a slave society where whites dominated free people of color and enslaved people through legally sanctioned violence. But another invisible hierarchy came to co-mingle with the racial order; white “acclimated citizens” stood atop the social pyramid, followed by white “unacclimated strangers,” followed by everyone else. Here, the acclimated wielded their immunity at every turn, making epidemiological discrimination a major form of bias in this already unequal society.
Agenda:
12:30 p.m. – Welcome Remarks by IIEP Director James Foster and Facing Inequality co-organizer Prof. Trevor Jackson
12:35 p.m. – Introductory Remarks and Setting the Stage by Dayna Matthew, GW Law School Dean
12:50 p.m. – “Immunocapital: Disease, Power, and Inequality in the Antebellum Cotton Kingdom” by Kathryn Olivarius, Stanford University
1:30 p.m. – Discussant Remarks by Martin Saavedra, Oberlin College
1:40 p.m. – Response by Kathryn Olivarius
1:45 p.m. – Audience Q&A moderated by IIEP Director James Foster
2:00 p.m. – Event Conclusion
About the Speakers:
Kathryn Olivarius is an Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University, where she has taught since 2017. Her research and teaching focus on slavery’s rise and fall in the American South and the wider Atlantic World, disease in the nineteenth century, the history of race and ethnicity, and the social upheaval of the Age of Revolutions. Last year, she was awarded Stanford’s Phi Beta Kappa teaching prize for undergraduate teaching. Before moving to California, she was a Past and Present postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Historical Research in London. Her book entitled Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom will be published by Harvard University Press in Fall 2021. Her article “Immunity, Power, and Belonging in Antebellum New Orleans,” was published by the American Historical Review last year.
About the Discussant:
Martin Saavedra is an Associate Professor of Economics at Oberlin College and earned his PhD in Economics from the University of Pittsburgh in 2014. He primarily works in the fields of economic history, health economics, and labor economics, and his research focuses on the economics of infectious disease, infant health, and the WW2 internment of Japanese Americans. His work has been published in the Journal of Economic History, Explorations in Economic History, the Journal of Economic Literature, among others.
About GW Law School Dean Danya Bowen Matthew:
Dayna Bowen Matthew, JD, PhD, is the Dean and Harold H. Greene Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law School. Dean Matthew is a leader in public health and civil rights law who focuses on racial disparities in health care. She joined the UVA Law faculty in 2017 and is the author of the book Just Medicine: A Cure for Racial Inequality in American Health Care. At UVA, she served as Co-Founder and Inaugural Director of The Equity Center, a transdisciplinary research center that seeks to build better relationships between UVA and the Charlottesville community through community-engaged scholarship that tangibly redresses racial and socioeconomic inequality.
Dean Matthew previously served on the University of Colorado law faculty as a Professor, Vice Dean, and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs. She was a member of the Center for Bioethics and Humanities on the Anschutz Medical Campus. Dean Matthew held a joint appointment at the Colorado School of Public Health. In 2013, she co-founded the Colorado Health Equity Project, a medical-legal partnership incubator aimed at removing barriers to good health for low-income clients by providing legal representation, research, and policy advocacy. In 2015, she served as the Senior Adviser to the Director of the Office of Civil Rights for the US Environmental Protection Agency, where she expedited cases on behalf of historically vulnerable communities besieged by pollution. She then became a member of the health policy team for US Senator Debbie Stabenow of Michigan and worked on public health issues. During 2015-16, she was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Fellow in Residence in Washington, DC, and pivoted her work toward population-level clients.
