Yellow Fever in New Orleans with Urmi Engineer Willoughby
Episode 51 - March 7, 2021
Urmi Engineer Willoughby (Pitzer College) joins the Infectious Historians to discuss Yellow Fever, with a focus on New Orleans over the course of the 19th century. Urmi first talks about the biological, the environmental, and human factors that shaped the spread of Yellow Fever from Africa to the Americas across the last few centuries. She then moves on to discuss its particular importance in the city of New Orleans with its differential effects on inhabitants depending on race and class in particular. Finally, she talks about questions of immunized people who survived Yellow Fever along with the ways in which her work could be used in other times and places, including today during Covid.
Further Reading
- Willoughby, Urmi Engineer. Yellow Fever, Race, and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans (Louisiana State University Press, 2017).
- Willoughby, Urmi Engineer. "Domesticated Mosquitoes: Colonization and the growth of mosquito habitats in North America." Mosquitopia: The Place of Pests in a Healthy World (Routledge, forthcoming 2021).
- “Race, Health, and Environment,” in Stephanie Foote and Jeffrey J. Cohen eds., The Cambridge Companion to the Environmental Humanities (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2021).
- Willoughby, Urmi Engineer. “The Ecology of Yellow Fever in Antebellum New Orleans: Sugar, Water Control, and Urban Development.” Environment & Society Portal, Arcadia (Spring 2018), no. 1. Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society.
- Willoughby, Urmi Engineer. “Sugar Revisited: Sweetness and the Environment in the Early Modern World,” in Giorgio Riello and Anne Gerritsen eds., The Global Lives of Things: Materiality, Material Culture and Commodities in the First Global Age (Routledge Press, 2015).
Our Guest
Urmi Engineer Willoughby,
Assistant Professor, Pitzer College
