Mariola Espinosa

Assistant Professor of History of Medicine (School of Medicine) and History

Mariola Espinosa’s primary research interest is the role of disease and public health in the history of Latin America and the Caribbean. Specifically, she concentrates on how diseases and responses to them shape relations of power between the peoples of the region and other actors in the international system. Her book, Epidemic Invasions: Yellow Fever and the Limits of Cuban Independence, 1878-1930, focuses on the many ways that endemic yellow fever in Havana influenced Cubans' relationships with the United States during the latter decades of the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth. She is currently working on new research that broadens the study of the effects of disease on empire to other Caribbean contexts.

Email: mariola.espinosa@yale.edu

Education

• Princeton University, A.B. 1996
• University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, M.A. 1998, Ph.D. 2003

Selected Publications

Books

1. Epidemic Invasions: Yellow Fever and the Limits of Cuban Independence, 1878-1930, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Project awarded the 2007 Jack D. Pressman-Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Development Award by the American Association for the History of Medicine.

Selected articles and chapters

1. “A Fever For Empire: U.S. Disease Eradication in Cuba As Colonial Public Health,” in Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco Scarano, ed., Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern U.S. State, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009.
2. “The Invincible Generals: Disease and the Fight for Empire in Cuba, 1868 to 1898,” in Poonam Bala, ed., Biomedicine as a Contested Site: Some Revelations in Imperial Context, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield (Lexington Books), 2009.
3. “Review of The Philip S. Hench Walter Reed Yellow Fever Online Collection, a website from the University of Virginia Health Sciences Library,“ Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 82, no. 3 (Fall 2008).
4. “Review of The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, The Epidemic That Shaped Our History, by Molly Caldwell Crosby,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 82, no. 3 (Summer 2008).
5. “The Threat from Havana: Southern Public Health, Yellow Fever, and U.S. Intervention in the Cuban Struggle for Independence, 1878-1898” Journal of Southern History 72:3 (2006); 541-568
6. “Review of Yellow Fever: A Deadly Disease Posed to Kill Again, by James L. Dickerson”, Journal of Southern History 73:3 (2006); 764-765.