In my literature and writing classrooms, I center thinkers who have long been pushed to the margins. I teach students to analyze literary texts, dance performances, and films while we explore Indigenous knowledge production, Black history and culture, disability poetics, and healthcare ethics. I ask: are we tempted to diagnose authors who seem to diverge from the “normal,” and what might happen if we yield to that temptation? Thus, while I guide students to interpret, I also urge them to question interpretation itself—to think critically about the vocabularies we use to describe those who diverge from constructed norms. 

My research draws upon feminist disability theory to assert ableism’s centrality to racial and gender violence. My monograph, Un/Diagnosable: Women Writing Disability in Nineteenth-Century America, is the first book-length study of disability in American women’s writing. I argue that Emily Dickinson, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Frances E.W. Harper transformed diagnosis from a tool for social control into a tool for social justice. Their texts supplement medical knowledge by conveying the messiness and raw potential of disabled embodiment without diagnostic simplification. Other forthcoming publications explore body-mind connections in stories by disabled, black, and Indigenous people of the Americas. I ask how fatigue and pain transform writing and community-building, demonstrating that stories from the past illuminate the ways people use sensational language to demand recognition in the present.