A two-and-a-half-minute tribute on a historian whose work made yellow fever a force in the political and economic history of the nineteenth-century American South, and immunity itself a form of capital.
Kathryn Olivarius is Associate Professor of History at Stanford University. Her book Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom (Belknap Press of Harvard, 2022) reads antebellum New Orleans through a single brutal fact: in a city where yellow fever killed roughly half of those it struck and left the survivors immune, having survived the disease became a kind of capital.
Olivarius coined the term immunocapital for the way fever survival functioned as creditworthiness, marriageability, employability, even a form of property. The Dan David Prize honored her for making epidemiology and the body central to the political and economic history of slavery and the cotton economy.
Olivarius tells the story of an entire economic system through a single life. This is a move the best twenty-first-century historians make often, and it is a hard one: the lives of thousands cannot really be told, but what we remember, as humans, is one story standing for a whole society. The film followed her method. We built our central figure, Ralph Roanoke, from the ground up, because no image of him survives, and let him carry the arc a statistical table never could.
The film's other decision was to animate the real period illustrations, the newspaper engravings of the yellow-fever wards, rather than invent our own. We wanted the viewer to see, in front of their eyes, what it was to be condemned to a possible death you could do nothing to prevent. And then the stranger, colder turn in Olivarius's argument, the one that lands very differently after a pandemic of our own: if you survived the fever, you gained a status. An "acclimated citizen" could get credit, marry, be trusted, do almost anything in New Orleans. Survival was not luck. It was capital. The film had to hold both the horror and that brutal logic in the same two and a half minutes.
A man reads Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, and the page he is holding becomes the film.
Most of the film comes out of that single newspaper page. Its vignettes were taken out one by one and set in motion.
Each year the Foundation chooses, with the laureate, the subject of the film they are honoured for, and we turn it into script, image and motion. The laureate sees it for the first time on the evening of the prize — on the big screen, in a room full of people who have come to honour them. Afterwards the films go out on social media, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and more, and on the Foundation’s own site, beside the committee’s reasoning and the laureate’s interview, and some laureates carry them into their own classrooms, to show what it is they work on.