Bethany Wade, Ph.D.
Office Location
Bethany Wade is a historian of Latin America and the Caribbean with interests in the history of pandemics, public health and burial. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh and taught in Pittsburgh and Atlanta before joining the faculty at Sacred Heart in August of 2022. She teaches classes on colonial and modern Latin America, world history, the history of medicine and pandemics, the history of death and dying, as well as the history of western civilization. She is currently working on a book manuscript on the history of burial in 19th-century Cuba and Puerto Rico that explores how the pandemic dead were instrumental in shaping modern regimes of public health. The book, currently called Quarantining the Dead, explores how changing physical and ritual acts surrounding the dead normalized a hybrid way of engaging the world that melded religious, public health, and commercial interests. Publications related to her research have been published in the Journal of Latino-Latin American Studies (JOLLAS), the journal Mortality and the edited volume Pandemics and Epidemics in Cultural Representation.
Degrees & Certifications
- Ph.D., Latin American History, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA,
- Dissertation: “Enlightened Burial: Death and Science in the Spanish Caribbean, 1800-1870”. Advisors: George Reid Andrews and Lara Putnam
- Ph.D. Certificate in Latin American Studies
- Ph.D. Certificate in Digital Studies and Methods
- World History Teaching Credential
- MA, Latin American and Iberian Studies, University of British Columbia Okanagan, Kelowna, BC
- BA, Cultural Studies, University of British Columbia Okanagan, Kelowna, BC
Teaching Responsibilities
- Latin America since 1826
- Western Civilization since 1500
- Hurricanes, Wildfires, and Pandemics: A Global History of Catastrophe, Death and Social Change
- Introduction to World History
Awards & Fellowships
- 2021-2023: Postdoctoral Fellow, Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University
- 2020-2021: Postdoctoral Associate, Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis
- 2020: Van Beck Hall Graduate Teaching Award, University of Pittsburgh
- 2019-2020: Lillian B. Lawler Fellowship, University of Pittsburgh
- 2018-2019: Andrew W. Mellon Predoctoral Fellowship, University of Pittsburgh
- 2017: Lydia Cabrera Prize, Conference on Latin American History (CLAH)
- 2013-2014: SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
Research Interests
- Caribbean History
- Death and Dying
- Medicine and Public Health
- Science and Technology
- Public and Digital Humanities