Liana DeMarco is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in African American Studies at Wesleyan University. She is an historian of labor, business, race, and medicine in the United States, especially the U.S. South, as well the Caribbean and the wider Black Atlantic. Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher for the Yale School of Medicine and Slavery Project. She holds a doctorate in history from Yale University. Her dissertation received the 2023 C. Vann Woodward Award for Best Dissertation in Southern History from the Southern Historical Association.

Dr. DeMarco's current book project, Sick Time: Medicine and Management under Slavery, examines the management of enslaved people’s health and the medicalization of their productivity in nineteenth-century Louisiana and Cuba. She argues that in this historical moment we can see the making of crucial ideas about labor, race, and health which persist in the U.S. today, such as the tie between employment and health care; the tendency to view health (especially Black people’s health) in terms of productivity; and the idea that a doctor should judge whether or not someone is sick enough to miss work. The book also examines enslaved people's medical labor and practices in a variety of environments, including cities, plantations, and the forests, swamps, and natural springs where enslaved people went to heal. Flight to these locations reveals how enslaved people developed their own meanings of sick time.

Liana's other writing can be found in the Journal of Southern History, the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Slavery & Abolition, Labor, Enterprise & Society, and forthcoming in Isis and the Bulletin of the History of Medicine.