About

I am a scholar of U.S. healthcare, comparative welfare state history, and civil rights law at Harvard University. My research focuses on the effect of anti-inflationary economic policy and colorblind ideology on public hospitals as well as the effect of fiscal policy on epidemic preparedness. The book manuscript Medical Scarcity: The Resegregation of Healthcare in America demonstrates that lawmakers under postwar American liberalism used scarcity, and later efficiency, as pretexts to organize who had rightful access to healthcare. By tracing medical scarcity’s implications for the distribution of healthcare along lines of race, class, gender, and sexuality, the book traces the paradox of abundance co-existing with impoverishment. In the process, the project illustrates how lawmakers minimized American public policy’s role in continuing to reproduce racialized health disparities after legalized Jim Crow’s fall. After the fiscal crisis of the 1970s, lawmakers undermined public insurance and hospital systems under the guise of fiscal probity with cuts that disproportionately harmed poorer communities. Jurists often affirmed these decisions and limited the reach of civil rights jurisprudence, which was previously honed on eliminating legal segregation. Afterwards, jurists allowed a veil of un-intentionality to justify the racialized consequences of hospital closures and acute care bed reductions in poor localities. The project is a genealogy of the ideology of medical scarcity, how it has reshaped the nature of public healthcare, and why it has produced dire health outcomes for Black, brown, and poor people from urban to rural America.

research

“Dismantling the Safety Net Hospital: The Construction of ‘Underutilization’ and Scarce Public Hospital Care,” Journal of Urban History, November 10, 2021.

Here’s my write-up for the Consortium for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine’s 2016–2017 research fellowship.

“ACT UP Founding Document and Speech” and “Lawrence v. Texas,” in Defining Documents in American History: Civil Rights (1954–2015), ed. Michael Shally-Jenson, 225-230, 236-243. Ipswitch, MA: Salem Press, 2015.

Public scholarship AND COMMENTARY

“Learning from Decades of Public Health Failure,” The Nation, January 19, 2022. 

“The Racist History That Explains Why Some Communities Don’t Have Enough ICU Beds,” Washington Post, September 16, 2020.

medIA

Teaching

From 2020-2022, I taught courses in Black Urban History and History of AIDS in the Department of Africana Studies at Stony Brook University. I taught a course at Columbia University called “Healthcare and the Welfare State.” The course surveyed the historical development of healthcare within systems of social protection in advanced, industrialized countries. Students digitally, and collaboratively, mapped out the healthcare geography of Harlem and wider boroughs, developed wikis on specific institutions’ histories, and delivered findings in the form of newspaper op-eds and reports to present-day organizations.

I will teach courses in Black History, History of Public Health, and Legal History at Harvard University beginning 2023.

Conference

I organized a workshop–conference and the beginnings of an edited volume of historical essays on “Law, Difference, and Healthcare: Making Sense of Structural Racism in Medico-Legal History” June 6–7, 2019 at Princeton University.

Yoga

200-hour Registered Yoga Teacher with Yoga Alliance. I teach accessible chair-based yoga and breathing meditation as part of my courses.

Music

My creative practice involves music-making under the act Efemèr (“ephemeral” in Kreyol). The debut EP Yearning is now available worldwide.