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History

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Farren Yero

Assistant Professor

fay224@lehigh.edu
0009 - Maginnes Hall
Education:

Ph.D. History and Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies, Duke University, 2020

M.A. History, Duke University, 2016

M.A. Latin American Studies, Tulane University, 2013

B.A. Anthropology, University of Florida, 2010

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Additional Interests

  • Medicine, Health, and the Body
  • Science and Technology
  • Gender and Sexuality Studies
  • African Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade
  • Empire and Colonialism

Research Statement

Farren Yero is an interdisciplinary scholar of health and medicine, specializing in gender and sexuality studies and the history of race and power in Latin America and the Caribbean. Her work broadly investigates the history of health disparities, care practices, and the experience of health and disease in the early modern Atlantic world. 

Her current book project, Atlantic Antidote: Race, Gender, and the Birth of the First Vaccine, is a history of smallpox vaccination and explores the racial and gendered intersections of labor, childrearing, and disease prevention in the eighteenth and nineteenth century Spanish Americas. It is based on her 2020 dissertation, which received the Nineteenth Century Studies Dissertation Award from the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) and the Richmond Brown Dissertation prize, Honorable Mention, from the Latin American and Caribbean Section of the Southern Historical Association.

Her next project, aimed at scholars, students, and the public alike, is a history of the Caribbean’s earliest smallpox epidemic (1519), told through the life of America’s first “patient zero,” an African man often cast as the primary source of smallpox spread to the mainland. Spanning 500 years of Spanish colonial history, the book brings together a wide corpus of materials to provide a historical study of early Black life in Sevilla, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Mexico and a literary analysis of this mysterious figure and the enduring afterlives of this early sixteenth-century outbreak narrative. 

Fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Fulbright-Hays program, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the John Carter Brown Library, the Newberry Library, the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture at the College of William and Mary have supported her research and writing. 

Biography

Farren Yero was born and raised in North Florida, where her deep family roots first sparked a passion for Atlantic history. As a result of the Seven Years' War, in 1768, a Scottish physician established the Florida colony of New Smyrna, recruiting around 1,300 settlers from the Balearic Islands of Spain. Within a decade, the colony collapsed. The survivors, about six hundred in number, marched the nearly seventy miles north to relocate to St. Augustine, where many of their descendants live to this day, including Yero's family. Florida has long maintained a tenuous relationship to both the United States and Latin America, existing on the margins of both of these regions. Growing up in this liminal space shaped her relationship to Latin America and continues to fuel an abiding and personal interest in Atlantic history, the place of borderlands, and the lives of people who were shaped by the currents of trans-imperial circulation, competition, and cooperation.

Yero first took this work up as an archaeology student at the University of Florida, where she worked as a student investigator at the Kingsley Plantation in Jacksonville, Florida, the home of the Scottish planter Zephaniah Kingsley and his wife, Anta Madgigine Jai, a Senegalese woman who was purchased by Kingsley as a slave in Cuba and freed in 1811. For two summers, she explored and excavated the slave quarters and helped to uncover their cemetery and continued this work in the University of Florida’s Historical Archaeology lab as a curatorial assistant. This project animated a deep interest and better understanding of both Florida and Spain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade, cultivating an awareness of the politics of slavery within peripheral spaces of the Spanish empire. This experience likewise influenced her MA research on the African Diaspora in Mexico. Her current and ongoing research on early modern health experiences and care practices is likewise animated by her interdisciplinary training and curiosity about the multicultural connections that span the Atlantic world. 

In this capacity, Yero has served as an editorial and publishing assistant for two of her field’s top journals, the Hispanic American Historical Review and Colonial Latin American Review. She was likewise a recent convener, along with Elena Conis and Travis Chi Wing Lau, of the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine “History and Politics of Immunity” Working Group; the project director of the Duke University Vaccine Equity and Feminist Health Policy project; and a research supervisor and collaborator on the Duke and Yale-NUS Global Care Policy Index. She has also served on the Conference on Latin American History (CLAH) Centennial Committee and is the current secretary and incoming president of the CLAH Atlantic Studies section. 

Prior to joining Lehigh, Yero was the Turovsky/Casey Family Post-Doctoral Fellow in Latin American History at Binghamton University, an NEH Postdoctoral Fellow at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, College of William and Mary, a CHCI-ACLS Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, and a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, Duke University. 

Book Chapters, Journal Articles, and Essays 

“Los Depósitos: Urban Children, Mexican Families, and the Making of America’s First Vaccine Bank,” Osiris,  Histories of Science and Childhoods Special Issue, 41(2026) (forthcoming) 

“Which Stranger’s Disease?: Immigration, Immunization and the Whitening of Cuba in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (Sept., 2024)

“Nahua Responses to the Matlazahuatl ‘or Mystery’ Plague of 1805,” Journal of Ethnohistory, 71. 1 (Jan., 2024) 

“Capturing Youth: Reproductive Labor and the Medicalization of Black Girlhood in the Early Nineteenth-Century Spanish Caribbean,” in Encountering Childhoods in Vast Early America,” eds. Julia Gossard and Holly White (Routledge, 2024) 

“Sounding Grief in the Gulf: Religion, Slavery, and Afro-Cuban Music in the Time of Cholera,” in The Power of Entertainment: Music, Arts and Healing in Pandemics, ed. Poonam Bala  (Lexington Books, 2024) 

“Smallpox and Slavery in Ah Cuzamil: a Reappraisal of Lucas Vásquez de Ayllón’s 1520 letter to Emperor Charles V,” Medicine and the Making of Race (June 5, 2023)

“Vaccine Voyages” Edinburgh Science Festival exhibit, co-hosted by the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh and the Edinburgh Infectious Diseases Network (April 9, 2022) 

Co-authored with Elizabeth O’Brien, “History of Health, Medicine, and Disease in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1600-1870,” Oxford Bibliographies in Latin American Studies (March 23, 2022)

“Divine Interventions: Revolution, Religion, and Smallpox in New Granada (1802-1805),” Age of Revolutions (February 7, 2022)

“Smallpox and the Specter of Mexican Citizenship, 1826” in Epidemic Urbanism: Contagious Diseases in Global Cities, eds. Mohammad Gharipour and Caitlin DeClercq (Bristol: Intellect, 2021)

“An Eradication: Empire, Enslaved Children, and the Whitewashing of Vaccine History,” Age of Revolutions (December 7, 2020)

“When Politics Go Viral: COVID-19 and Lessons from the Atlantic World” The Panorama (April 24, 2020)

“Juana Aguilar: Hermaphroditism and Colonial Courts,” in The Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer History, ed. Howard Chiang (Charles Scribner's Sons, 2019) (2020 ALA Dartmouth Medal)

“When Medicine is a Sin: Sex and Heresy in Colonial Mexico,” The Recipes Project (Dec. 5, 2019) 

Recent Conferences and Presentations

2024  Principal Organizer, "Health and the Body: Perspectives from the History of Latin America and the Caribbean” Symposium, Binghamton University 

2024   Principal Organizer, “Community Histories of Health and Healing” Workshop Series, Binghamton University                                                                      

2024   “Echoes of the Balmis Expedition: Art, Memory, and Narrative in Vaccine History,” keynote address for the Red de Estudios de Ciencias y Saberes en Latinoamérica y el Caribe (RECSLAC) Conference on the Narration in and of Science and Knowledge in Latin America and the Caribbean, College Park, MD

2024   “A New World Exodus: Francisco Eguía and the Myth of America’s First ‘Patient Zero,’” Red de Estudios de Ciencias y Saberes en Latinoamérica y el Caribe (RECSLAC) Conference on the Narration in and of Science and Knowledge in Latin America and the Caribbean, College Park, MD

2024   ““Xekik: Maya Healing and History in Carlos Finlay’s Epidemiology of Yellow Fever,” History of Science Society Annual Conference, Mérida, Mexico

2024   “Birthing the First Vaccine: Child Labor and the Reproduction of Empire,” Latin American Studies Association Conference, Bogotá, Colombia

2024   “Early Latin American and Caribbean Histories of Medicine, Race, and Gender: A Workshop on Methods and Archives” Roundtable, American Association for the History of Medicine, Kansas City 

2023   “Vaccine Refusal, Women’s Labor, and ‘Cimarrón Care’ in Southern Veracruz,” Instituto Tepoztlán para la Historia Transnacional de las Américas, Tepoztlán, Mexico       

2022   “A Remedy to Empire: Preventing Smallpox in the Age of Abolition” Edinburgh Centre for Global History, University of Edinburgh

2022   “Fugitive Intimacy: Reimagining Vaccine Refusal as Freedom from Consent,” History of the Gendered Body Series, University of Oxford

2021   “From Inoculation to Vaccination,” Ben Franklin’s World Podcast, Episodes 301 and 302, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture 

2021 “Decolonizing COVID” Roundtable, Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest, Villanova University 

2021   Chair, “Epidemics in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions,” American Historical Association, New Orleans 

2021   “Gossip Girls: Smallpox, Rumors, and the Politics of Motherhood in Greater New Spain” Latin American and Caribbean Studies Section/Southern Historical Association Conference, New Orleans

2021   “Reproducing Empire: Race, Gender, and the Birth of the First Vaccine,” American Society for Ethnohistory Conference, Durham, NC

2020   “The World’s First Vaccine: A History of Gender, Race, and Rights in the Americas,” Iniciativa de Estudios Globales, Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos

Teaching

Farren Yero teaches a wide range of courses related to health, medicine, and society, including courses on health and food history; the human body; gender, science, and medicine; pandemics and public health; and methods in digital and public history. These courses include:

Health and Society in Latin America and the Caribbean (HIST/HMS/LAS 191)