I’ve got a piece out today in the medical journal CHEST about tobacco! Besides learning a wildly different citation style, it was a chance to consider history writing for a different audience. Medical doctors are certainly familiar with tobacco’s health risks, but I wanted to provide a deeper contextualization of tobacco’s connections to financial risk, enslaved labor, and medicine in the early modern Atlantic world. You can find it HERE.

5/06/21

Last night I discussed Merchants of Medicines with one of my mentors, Harold Cook, at a By The Book event hosted by the University of Chicago Press. You can view a recording of the entire session on Youtube. Earlier in the year I also spoke about the connections of the global medicine trade to New England’s forests at the Maine Historical Society. That is also available online. I have a few more book events lined up for the next few months that I’ll publicize soon.

4/21/21

Catching up on a few updates after a hectic fall semester: Merchants of Medicines was a finalist for the Library Company of Philadelphia’s biennial first book award and an essay of mine discussing the book’s core themes of early modern empire fundamentally altering expectations and modes of healthcare appeared in the Boston Review in September, fulfilling a longstanding goal of mine.

1/04/21

7/15/20

It’s Merchants of Medicines’ official release day. You can grab a copy on Amazon or from the UCP Website. Also, you can read a recent blog post about it here.

6/20/20

Copies of Merchants of Medicines arrived today! After nearly a decade of work and some agonizing delays due to the current pandemic my book is out in the world.

5/19/20

Today I was interviewed on KCBS radio (San Francisco, CA) [link & audio] about the political and economic context of hydroxychloroquine and other “silver bullet” or “magic wand” cures for Covid-19.

4/26/20

Continuing the thread, I contributed an op-ed to The Washington Post’s Made By History column [link] on the historical context and future consequences of the search for quick Covid-19 treatments.

4/15/20

I wrote a blog post for The Chicago Blog [link] about the ways the death of black Americans due to coronavirus at a disproportionately high rate recalls the ways differential mortality reflects and has shaped ideas of inherent bodily difference in the past.

3/24/20

The 2020 Omohundro Institute Conference has been postponed until June 2021. Disappointed I’ll have to wait until then to visit Williamsburg and share some new work on our panel “Material Encounters with Authenticity and Counterfeit in the Early Modern Atlantic World.”

1/30/20

The new cover for Merchants of Medicines has arrived! Check it out on this website’s book page or at The University of Chicago Press and keep your eyes peeled for more book content coming soon.