New Books in Disability Studies

Tales of Health: Illness, Disability, and Citizenship in the Romantic National Tale (Liverpool UP, 2026) is about the way the Romantic National Tale exercises power and defines the boundaries of citizenship through the categories of health, illness, and disability. When we see these categories at work in these novels, we understand how socio-political belonging is premised on the conception of the healthy body, to the exclusion of bodies deemed otherwise. Employing the medical humanities and, especially, the social determinants of health, this book shows that the National Tale achieves its consolidation of the nation through its enforcement of a rigorous pol...

Hotels represent nations, hosting visiting monarchs, politicians, and diplomats. Hotels underpin global networks of travel and communication, on which national and international prosperity have increasingly depended since the end of the First World War. Yet hotels are also places where people can be anonymous; where murderers and thieves mix with adulterers and con artists; and where prejudice finds expression in who is refused access, and in the forms of 'service' provided by staff in the lowest-paid roles. The Secret Life of the Hotel: Sex, Crime and Protest in British Guesthouses Since 1918 (Bloomsbury, 2026) by Professor Eloise Moss is the first bo...

Mainstream psychology has long accepted that some people (like those with autism) are naturally more logical and unemotional, while others (like so-called empaths) intuitively experience the feelings of those around them as deeply as their own. But this is wrong. Aimee Cliff, an autistic psychotherapist who empathizes for a living, knows this firsthand. We are all are capable of empathy, because empathy is something you do, not something you are—meaning you can get better at it if you choose to practice.

Drawing on scientific research, clinical experience, and interviews with neurodivergent people, Aimee Cliff examines how empa...

Currencies of Cruelty: Slavery, Freak Shows, and the Performance Archive (NYU Press, 2026) is a bold and incisive reconsideration of the relationship between enslavement, disability, and performance in 19th- and early 20th-century America; a time when transition from slavery to legal freedom became entangled with the spectacle of the freak show stage, where disabled and racialized performers became lucrative attractions.

At the heart of this powerful study are conjoined twins Millie Christine McKoy, born into slavery and later emancipated, and the so-called “original Siamese Twins,” Chang and Eng Bunker, who navigated the freak show circuit not only as perfo...

We often think of medieval medicine as strange, unhygienic and unscientific, but The Medieval Guide to Healthy Living (Reaktion, 2026) by Dr. Katherine Harvey reveals a far richer story. Long before modern wellness trends, people in the Middle Ages were actively thinking about how to live well. They followed detailed health regimens, balanced diet with exercise, considered the effects of emotions and sought to avoid illness through environmental awareness and routine care. This book sheds light on the practical and surprisingly relatable ways medieval individuals cared for body and mind. Drawing from historical sources that echo today’s wellness concerns, it o...

In Twenty-Two Cents an Hour: Disability Rights and the Fight to End Subminimum Wages (Cornell UP, 2022), Doug Crandell uncovers the harsh reality of people with disabilities in the United States who are forced to work in unethical conditions for subminimum wages with little or no opportunity to advocate for themselves, while wealthy CEOs grow even wealthier as a direct result. As recently as 2016, the United States Congress enacted bipartisan legislation which continued to allow workers with disabilities to legally be paid far lower than the federal minimum wage. Drawing on ongoing federal Department of Justice lawsuits, the horrifying story of Henry's...

Hypochondria: In Sickness and in Story (Reaktion, 2026) proposes a bold reimagining of a frequently dismissed condition. Dr. Susannah B. Mintz reframes health anxiety not as a pathology but as a site of creative potential – exploring hypochondria as a form of communication, a reorientation to time, a convergence of personal and communal identity, a declaration of bodymind needs and an embrace of ageing’s transformations. Far-ranging in its attention to historical periods, national literatures, philosophical thought and medical discourse, the book challenges the containment of suffering within narratives of professional authority. In doing so, it seeks to dispel shame and stigm...

This is a special edition of the New York Institute for the Humanities’ Vault podcast. On October 10, 2025, NYU’s Journalism Institute hosted a day-long conference titled Podcast Intellectuals: Producing Original Scholarship with Audio. Over the course of three panels, scholars, podcasters, and journalists discuss how academics might employ the techniques of narrative audio as part of their research.

In the first panel, podcaster Benjamen Walker discusses his work with NYU media studies professor Mara Mills as they produce Tuning Time, a podcast about the politics of time stretching technology. Professor Mills is an interdisciplinary scholar in the fields o...

A Light in the Tower argues that excellent education and radical support for mental health struggles can coexist, and provides detailed advice for how to do so. Dr. Katie Rose Guest Pryal debunks claims that supporting student mental health harms educational rigor (coining the term “rigor angst” to discuss the fear that rigor is declining). She outlines actionable steps professors and administrators can take, including abandoning ableist and exclusionary campus culture; replacing “bad-hard” work that creates unnecessary logistical difficulties for students in favor of “good-hard” work that challenges them intellectually; providing an easy path to disability accommodations; and teaching accessibly fo...

In the thirty years since the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law, the lives of disabled people have not improved nearly as much as activists and politicians had hoped. In Crip Negativity (U of Minnesota Press, 2023), J. Logan Smilges shows us what’s gone wrong and what we can do to fix it.

Leveling a strong critique of the category of disability and liberal disability politics, Smilges asks and imagines what horizons might exist for the liberation of those oppressed by ableism—beyond access and inclusion. Inspired by models of negativity in queer studies, Black studie...

For people who are living with disability, including various forms of chronic diseases and chronic pain, daily tasks like lifting a glass of water or taking off clothes can be difficult if not impossible. In Activist Affordances: How Disabled People Improvise More Habitable Worlds (Duke UP, 2023), Arseli Dokumacı draws on ethnographic work with differently disabled people whose ingenuity, labor, and artfulness allow them to achieve these seemingly simple tasks. Dokumacı shows how they use improvisation to imagine and bring into being more habitable worlds through the smallest of actions and the most fleeting of movements---what she calls “activist affordances.” Even as...

A transcript of this interview is available [here]

Preserving Disability: Disability and the Archival Profession (Library Juice Press, 2024) weaves together first-person narratives and case studies contributed from disabled archivists and disabled archives users, bringing critical perspectives and approaches to the archival profession. Contributed chapters span topics such as accessibility of archives and first-person experiences researching disability collections for disabled archives users; disclosure and accommodations and self-advocacy of disabled archivists; and processing and stewarding disability-related collections. Collectively, these works address the nuances of both disability and archives-critically drawing attention to the histories, present experiences, and future possibilities of the...

A transcript of this interview is available [here]

A queer disabled love song to trees and beavers, tremors and dreams, Unfurl: Survivals, Sorrows, and Dreaming (Duke UP, 2025) explores the pulsing core and porous edges of survival, sorrow, and dreaming. Blending poetry and creative nonfiction, emotion and activist thinking, Eli Clare invites us to unfurl ourselves into the lovely multitude of genders beyond the binary of woman and man, the fierceness of street protest, and the long slow time of granite. He sings to aquifers. Wrestles with the aftermath of child abuse and his family’s legacy as white...

By Touch Alone: Blindness and Reading in Nineteenth-Century Culture (U Michigan Press, 2025) by Dr. Vanessa Warne demonstrates how reading by touch not only changed the lives of nineteenth-century blind people, but also challenged longstanding perceptions about blindness and reading. Over the course of the nineteenth century, thousands of blind people learned how to read by touch. Using fiction, essays, letters, and speeches authored by blind readers, By Touch Alone traces the ways in which literacy changed blind people's experiences of education, leisure, spirituality, and social engagement. Analyzing records of activism and innovation as well as frustration, this study documents the...

What if we embraced neurodivergent ways of being not as deviations to be corrected but as vital ways of inhabiting the world? What new realities might emerge? Bringing a much-needed humanistic perspective to the study of autism and other forms of neurodivergence, Counter-Cartographies: Neurodivergence and the Errancies of Performance (U Minnesota Press, 2025) offers a bold reimagining of neurological difference, moving beyond rigid diagnostic frameworks to uncover more expansive, generative modes of existence.

Engaging the work of Fernand Deligny to trace how modern taxonomies of neurodivergence have hardened over time, Leon J. Hilton questions how these categories might inste...

The book, Racing Uphill: Confronting a Life with Epilepsy (U of Minnesota Press, 2025), is a memoir and an educational resource, which tells the story of an Emmy Award-winning TV news Journalist, Stacia Kalinoski. The author's aim is beyond giving an account of her experience of epilepsy, her goal is to sensitize readers and inspire epileptic patients and other people battling with ailments that carry social stigma, emphasizing the importance of taking control of one's health. In the book, Stacia Kalinoski recounts her experience of visual distortions and feelings of déjà vu and jamais vujamais vu, which are auras that ofte...

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Tazin Abdullah speaks with Dr. Esther Monzó-Nebot, Associate Professor in Translation and Interpreting Studies at Universitat Jaume I in Catalunya. They talk about Dr. Monzó-Nebot's new book The Social Impact of Automating Translation: An Ethics of Care Perspective on Machine Translation.

The conversation delves into ideological issues involved in the widespread use of machine translation and the real-life impact for those who may rely on machine translations in various situations. Esther’s research and the wide variety of contributions to the book highlight the need to ope...

Ungendering Menstruation by Ela Przybyło discusses why and how menstrual pain needs to be incorporated into discussions of gender, embodiment, and disability. Honing a "cranky" approach to being a menstruating body expected to accept and embrace trauma, Ungendering Menstruation examines menstrual suppression, toxicity, and the cooptation of menstrual positivity rhetoric. Drawing on their own experiences as a toxic shock survivor and a menstrual pain and period dysphoria sufferer, Ela Przybyło questions why, on what terms, and for whom menstruation has been fixed around experiences of pain. Instead, they present a vision for menstrual justice that refuses the woman...

What if our society’s deepest prejudices weren’t about race, gender, or sexuality—but height? In his groundbreaking allegorical novel, acclaimed Jordanian author and activist Fadi Zaghmout imagines just such a world, crafting a powerful meditation on discrimination and desire that speaks directly to our contemporary debates about identity and inclusion.

The Man of Middling Height (Syracuse University Press, 2025) follows a short dressmaker whose life is upended when she meets Tallan, a man whose middle height places him outside the rigid tall/short binary that governs their society. As their forbidden romance blossoms, they must navigate a world...

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Brynn Quick speaks with Dr. Leah Karliner. Dr. Karliner is Professor in Residence in the Division of General Internal Medicine, Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco in the United States. She is Director of the Center for Aging in Diverse Communities and Director of the Multiethnic Health Equity Research Center. She is both a practicing general internist and a health services researcher, with expertise in practice-based and communication research. An important aspect of her scholarly work centres on improving quality of care for patients with limited...

We all hope to grow old with dignity and some joyfulness. The intimate narratives of 40 extraordinary elders shared in I'll Fly Away: Stories About Amazing Disabled Elders explore both the challenges of aging and the joys and vibrancy that often persist in the twilight years. Poignant observations of the patients and families by a team of health professionals intersecting daily at the Center for Elders' Independence in Oakland, California, reveal the complexities of aging, identity, amid the assertive persistence of the human spirit.

From a couple's summer drive across the Arizona desert to a family's struggle with men...

Inclusion, Exclusion, Agency, and Advocacy: Experiences of Women With Physical Disabilities in China, With Worldwide Implications (IAP, 2024) explores the lived experiences of six women, including the author herself, with physical disabilities in China. The book provides in-depth descriptions of each woman's experiences in different aspects and analyze the commonalities and differences in their experiences through their life courses. The book explores answers to some of these questions: How do physically disabled women make sense of their experiences? What are some of the empowering and/or disempowering moments/events in their lives, if any? What are disabled women's experiences in t...

There exist problematic attitudes and beliefs about dwarfism that have rarely been challenged, but continue to construct people with dwarfism as an inferior group within society. Midgetism: The Exploitation and Discrimination of People with Dwarfism (Routledge, 2023) introduces the critical term 'midgetism', which the author has coined, to demonstrate that the socio-cultural discrimination people with dwarfism experience is influenced by both heightism and disablism.

As a result, it unpacks and challenges the problematic social assumptions that reinforce midgetism within society, including the acceptability of 'midget entertainment' and 'non-normate space', to demonstrate how particular spaces can either aid in re...

Window Shopping with Helen Keller: Architecture and Disability in Modern Culture (U Chicago Press, 2025) offers a history of how encounters between architects and people with disabilities transformed modern culture.

Window Shopping with Helen Keller recovers a series of influential moments when architects and designers engaged the embodied experiences of people with disabilities. David Serlin reveals how people with sensory and physical impairments navigated urban spaces and helped to shape modern culture. Through four case studies--the lives of Joseph Merrick (aka "The Elephant Man") and Helen Keller, the projects of the Works Progress Administration, and the design of the...

Tattoos are not merely decorative; they contain deep meaning for individuals and communities. They document their wearers' personal histories and position in families or society, and they engage with a communal understanding of symbols.
Stories on Skin: A Librarian's Guide to Tattoos as Personal Archives (Bloomsbury, 2025) by Terry Baxter & Libby Coyner-Tsosie makes the case that archivists who want to preserve as full a human story as possible must recognize the rich documentation provided by tattoos. It also argues, in a broader sense, that traditional archives are not representative of the ways human beings transmit information through time and t...

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Emily Pacheco speaks with Associate Professor Su Kyong Isakson (Community College of Baltimore County, USA) about her 2018 paper, The Case for Heritage ASL Instruction for Hearing Heritage Signers. The conversation focuses on heritage signers, differentiated instruction, and sign language interpreter education.

For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.

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In Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-Of-Color Writing (Duke UP, 2025), Jina B. Kim develops what she calls crip-of-color critique, bringing a disability lens to bear on feminist- and queer-of-color literature in the aftermath of 1996 US welfare reform and the subsequent evisceration of social safety nets. She examines literature by contemporary feminist, queer, and disabled writers of color such as Jesmyn Ward, Octavia Butler, Karen Tei Yamashita, Samuel Delany, and Aurora Levins Morales, who each bring disability and dependency to the forefront of their literary freedom dreaming. Kim shows that in their writing, liberation do...

How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic is the first book to document the experiences of those hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City—disabled people. Diverse disability communities across the five boroughs have been disproportionately impacted by city and national policies, work and housing conditions, stigma, racism, and violence—as much as by the virus itself. Disabled and chronically-ill activists have protested plans for medical rationing and refuted the eugenic logic of mainstream politicians and journalists who “reassure” audiences that only older people and those with disabilities continue to die from COVID-19. At the same time, as...

The last few years have brought increased writings from activists, artists, scholars, and concerned clinicians that cast a critical and constructive eye on psychiatry, mental health care, and the cultural relations of mental difference. With particular focus on accounts of lived experience and readings that cover issues of epistemic and social injustice in mental health discourse, the Mad Studies Reader: Interdisciplinary Innovations in Mental Health (Routledge, 2024) brings together voices that advance anti-sanist approaches to scholarship, practice, art, and activism in this realm. Beyond offering a theoretical and historical overview of mad studies, this Reader draws on the perspectives, voices, an...

Today we present the first episode of a miniseries on audiobooks by getting into the history and theory of the medium. Audiobooks are having a moment—and it only took them over a century to get here. Dr. Matthew Rubery, a Harvard PhD and Professor of Modern Literature at Queen Mary University of London, pioneered the study of the audiobook, its history, and its affordances. 

Among his other works, Dr. Rubery is the author of The Untold Story of the Talking Book (2016, Harvard University Press). He’s also the editor of Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies (2011, Routledge). Matt’s la...

Shahd Alshammari’s Confetti and Ashes: Reflections on Wellness (Literary Mentor Words for Wellness, 2025) is a speculative memoir that questions what it means to live a good life. Blending personal experiences with the voices of ghosts and a seductive Qareen, this is a meditative exploration of consciousness and the liminal spaces we exist in.

As a passionate Squash player, the narrator delves into the transformative power of sports. This lyrical narrative is genre-defying, refusing to adhere to conventional ways of narrating stories we carry within our bodies. Multi-layered and in many voices, this is a narrative of memo...

In contemporary China, people diagnosed with serious mental illnesses have long been placed under the guardianship of close relatives who decide on their hospitalization and treatment. Despite attempts at reforms to ensure patient rights, the 2013 Mental Health Law reinforced the family's rights and responsibilities. 

In Between Families and Institutions, Zhiying Ma examines how ideological, institutional, and technological processes shape families' complicated involvement in psychiatric care. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in psychiatric hospitals, community mental health teams, social work centers, and family support groups as well as interviews with policymakers and activists, Ma maps the workings of wh...

Through a thoughtful investigation, Disability in Ptolemaic Egypt and the Hellenistic World: Plato’s Stepchildren (Routledge, 2024) reveals often-overlooked narratives of disability within Ptolemaic Egypt and the larger Hellenistic world (332 BCE to 30 BCE). Chapters explore evidence of physical and intellectual disability, ranging from named individuals; representations of people and mythological figures with dwarfism, blindness and vision impairments; cerebral palsy; mobility impairments; spinal disability; and medicine, healing, and prosthetics. Morris examines the historiographical ways in which disability has been approached, and how ancient disability histories are (mis)represented in various contemporary spaces. It uses terminology informed by the disability community and offe...

The asylum--at once a place of refuge, incarceration, and abuse--touched the lives of many Americans living between 1830 and 1950. What began as a few scattered institutions in the mid-eighteenth century grew to 579 public and private asylums by the 1940s. About one out of every 280 Americans was an inmate in an asylum at an annual cost to taxpayers of approximately $200 million.

Using the writing of former asylum inmates, as well as other sources, Writing Mad Lives in the Age of the Asylum (Oxford UP, 2025) reveals a history of madness and the asylum that has remained hidden by a focus on...

Queer Childhoods: Institutional Futures of Indigeneity, Race, and Disability (NYU Press, 2024) explores how the institutional management of children's sexualities in boarding schools affected children's future social, political, and economic opportunities

Tracing the US's investment in disciplining minoritarian sexualities since the late nineteenth century, Mary Zaborskis focuses on a ubiquitous but understudied figure: the queer child. Queer Childhoods examines the lived and literary experiences of children who attended reform schools, schools for the blind, African American industrial schools, and Native American boarding schools. In mapping the institutional terrain of queer childhoods in educational settings of the late nineteenth- a...

Whitney Dirks joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, Monstrosity, Bodies, and Knowledge in Early Modern England: Curiosity to See and Behold (Amsterdam University Press, 2024). In 1680, the poor cottager Mary Herring gave birth to conjoined twins. At two weeks of age, they were kidnapped to be shown for money, and their deaths shortly thereafter gave rise to a four-year legal battle over ownership and income. The Herring twins' microhistory weaves throughout this book, as the chapter structure alternates between the family's ordeal and the broader cultural context of how so-called 'monstrous births' (a contemporary term for deformed hum...

This volume of Osiris places disability history and the history of science in conversation to foreground disability epistemologies, disabled scientists, and disability sciencing (engagement with scientific tools and processes). Looking beyond paradigms of medicalization and industrialization, the volume authors also examine knowledge production about disability from the ancient world to the present in fields ranging from mathematics to the social sciences, resulting in groundbreaking histories of taken-for-granted terms such as impairment, infirmity, epidemics, and shōgai.

Some contributors trace the disabling impacts of scientific theories and practices in the contexts of war, factory labor, insurance, and colonialism; oth...

Jonathan Sterne is one of the most influential scholars working on sound and listening. His 2003 book, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction, had a formative influence on the then-nascent field of sound studies. His 2012 book, MP3: The Meaning of a Format, was both a fascinating cultural history and a deep meditation on the purpose of compression technology in capitalism. Today, Sterne talks to Phantom Power about his new book, Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment (Duke UP 2022). Specifically, he tells the story of the “Dork-o-phone,” a vocal amplifier he wears to give talks or communicate in loud spaces...

Deep below the ground in Tucson, Arizona, lies an aquifer forever altered by the detritus of a postwar Superfund site. Disabled Ecologies: Lessons From a Wounded Desert (U California Press, 2024) by Dr. Sunaura Taylor, tells the story of this contamination and its ripple effects through the largely Mexican-American community living above. Drawing on her own complex relationship to this long-ago injured landscape, Dr. Taylor takes us with her to follow the site's disabled ecology—the networks of disability, both human and wild, that are created when ecosystems are corrupted and profoundly altered. What Taylor finds is a story of entan...

People with dementia are uniquely qualified to discuss the challenges of their condition and the features of effective support, but their voices are all too often drowned out in research and debates about policy. According to People with Dementia at the Heart of Research: Co-Producing Research through The Dementia Enquirers Model (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2024) by Rachael Litherland & Philly Hare, it's time for that to change.

Dementia Enquirers is an ambitious and novel programme of work which has tested out what it means for people with dementia to lead research and has developed a new 'driving seat' approach to...