Kathryn Olivarius is an Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University. Her research concerns disease, citizenship, and economics in the 19^th century United States, though she teaches broadly on Atlantic slavery, the Age of Revolutions, and the social and cultural impacts of the American Civil War.

Olivarius is a social historian of disease. She studies how past epidemics shaped societies, citizenship and capitalism. In her work, she has focused mainly on two highly lethal and contagious diseases – yellow fever and syphilis – which killed tens of thousands of people, reshaped political culture and ultimately controlled access to power. She explores how humans and states use disease (as well as immunity to disease) for social and economic ends and how disease becomes embedded into markets and capitalism itself.

Her first book, Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom (Harvard University Press), examines yellow fever, immunity, and inequality in the American South. It won multiple prizes and accolades, including the Frederick Jackson Turner Award for the best first book in American history from the Organization of American Historians as well as the Prize in American History for an outstanding first book in U.S. history from the American Historical Association.

She is currently working on her next book, which considers the rapid spread of syphilis during the Gilded Age, and how Americans developed a new language to understand health, identity, and shame to cope with their trauma.

Olivarius earned her BA in history from Yale University in 2011. She received an MSt in U.S. History in 2013 and a DPhil in History in 2017 from the University of Oxford. Before joining the Stanford faculty, she was a Past and Present postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London.