Liana DeMarco is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in African American Studies at Wesleyan University. She is an historian of medicine, race, and labor in the United States, the Caribbean, and the wider Black Atlantic. Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher for the Yale School of Medicine and Slavery Project. She received her doctorate from the Department of History's Program in the History of Science and Medicine at Yale University. Her dissertation won the 2023 C. Vann Woodward Award for Best Dissertation in Southern History from the Southern Historical Association.

Dr. DeMarco's first 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 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 health 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. 

She has also begun research for two more book-length projects. The first is a 200-year history of Black medical labor and labor activism, and the second will examine changing ideas of health, medicine, and the laboring body in American business education.

Liana's 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.