About Me

I am a historian of Atlantic slavery, U.S. medicine, and racism and an Assistant Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. I completed my masters and doctoral education at Tulane University in New Orleans, graduating in 2016. My work focuses on the role Atlantic slavery and scientific racism played in shaping the curriculum of medical schools in the past and present. Most recently, I have received grants and fellowships from Harvard University, The Huntington Library, The Pennsylvania State University, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and Emory University, and I am currently a visiting fellow in the University of Pennsylvania’s study “Penn Medicine and the afterlives of slavery.” I have also begun researching a new monograph entitled Collected Without Consent: A Global History of Harvard Medical School’s Racial Skulls and writing a synthesis of modern medical history, entitled Capitalism and Medicine: A History. You can learn more about both projects here. I also have published peer-reviewed essays in The New West Indian Guide, The Journal of Southern History, and The Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, and you can read summaries or access the full articles here. My public-facing editorials, reviews, and blogs have been published by The Washington Post, Black Perspectives, and The Oxford University Press Blog, and my media appearances and recorded talks can be found here.

My book, Masters of the Health: Racial Science and Slavery in U.S. Medical Schools, was published in fall 2022 by UNC Press and can be ordered here. I also am the editor of the book Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery, which was published by LSU Press in 2021 and can be purchased here. Finally, check out my latest article in the Washington Post’s “Made by History” section entitled, “Corpse Selling and Stealing were Once Integral to Medical Training.”