Heather McCrea received her PhD in history from Stony Brook University in 2002. She is currently an associate professor of history at Kansas State University. She also taught at California State University at Fullerton between 2003 and 2006. Her research draws medical and environmental histories together to further understand the overlapping roles of disease, illness, health, and the environment in the construction of modern nation-states and the formation of identity during late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Mexico, Central America and the trans-Caribbean.
RCC Research Project: Gulf of Disease: Environment, Medicine, and State-Building in Cuba, Mexico and Panama, 1880–1940
Selected Publications:
- Diseased Relations: Epidemics, Public Health, and State-building in Yucatán, Mexico 1847-1924. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, May 2010.
- "From Pest to Vector: Disease, Public Health and the Challenges of State-Building in Yucatán, Mexico, 1833–1922" in Centering Animals in Latin American History, edited by Martha Few and Zeb Tortorici. Duke University Press, June 2013.
- "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, edited by Louise Breen. New York: Routledge Press, December 2011.
- "On Sacred Ground: The Church and Burial Rites in Nineteenth-Century Yucatán." Journal of Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 23, no. 1 (2007): 33–62.