Kate Mulry is a historian of science, medicine, and the environment in the early modern Atlantic world. As a short-term fellow at the Science History Institute, she investigated a range of exploitative ideas developed by English medical writers about Jamaica in the late 17th century. These writers urged Jamaica’s new English proprietors to cultivate cacao and claimed consuming chocolate both boosted women’s fertility and enabled physical exertion. They anticipated cacao would solve the island’s population and labor needs.
Kate is an associate professor of history at California State University, Bakersfield. She is the author of An Empire Transformed: Remolding Bodies and Landscapes in the Restoration Atlantic (New York University Press, 2021). Her current project has also been awarded a “Before ‘Farm to Table’: Early Modern Foodways and Cultures” fellowship from the Folger Shakespeare Library, an Eccles Centre Visiting Fellowship at The British Library, and a research fellowship at the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine.