Heather McCrea

Associate Professor

Office: 002D Calvin Hall
Email: hmccrea@ksu.edu

I work on nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, focusing on medical, environmental and indigenous history. My new book project, Gulf of Disease: Public Health in Latin America and the Invention of Trans-Caribbean Identity, explores public health in Latin America's tropics. Situated at the crossroads wherein medical science and empiricism merged with human suffering and environmental determinism, this project examines the formation of a tropical identity in tandem with the rise of tropical medicine and state-building through the lens of disease control campaigns during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the tropical ports of New Orleans, Veracruz, Progreso, Havana, Panama City, and Caracas.

Select Publications

Diseased Relations: Epidemics, Public Health and State Building in Yucatán, Mexico 1848-1924 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2011)

"Tentative Testimonies: Indigenous and Spanish Accounts of the Conquest and Colonization of New Spain 1100-1650," in Converging Worlds: Communities and Cultures in Colonial America, ed. Louise Breen (New York: Routledge), forthcoming spring 2012

"From Pest to Vector: Disease, Public Health and the Challenges of State-Building in Yucatán, Mexico, 1833-1922," in Recentering Animals in Latin American History, ed. Martha Few and Zeb Tortorici (Durham: Duke University Press), forthcoming 2012

"On Sacred Ground: The Church and Burial Rites in Nineteenth-Century Yucatán," Journal of Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 23 (2007)

Courses Taught

Graduate classes

Security in Latin America

Undergraduate Classes

Conquests and Conquistadors in Hispanic America

Death and Dying in History