The formal turn is well underway in Critical Disability Studies. Inaugurated by David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s Narrative Prosthesis, Robert McRuer’s Crip Theory, Tobin Siebers’ Disability Aesthetics, and Robin Blyn’s The Freak-Garde, the formal analysis of works by disabled artists and about disabled subjects seeks to analyze and taxonomize disability aesthetics in their manifold structures, modes, and styles. As Siebers persuasively argues, “disability aesthetics” both “names a critical concept that seeks to emphasize the presence of disability in the tradition of representation” and “refuses to recognize representation of the healthy body—and its definition of harmony, integrity, and beauty—as the sole criteria of the aesthetic.” The refusal of “normative” formal values that Siebers and others see as so fundamental to disability aesthetics is also a defining feature of the avant-garde, which Timothy Yu argues is “an aesthetic and a social grouping, defined as much by its formation of a distinctive kind of community as by its revolutionary aesthetics.” But though avant-garde art and literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are filled with what Michael Bérubé calls “deployments of disability”—that include both characterization and narrative form—and though many of history’s most famous avant-garde artists and writers have been disabled, the centrality of disability to the avant-garde remains undertheorized.

Institute for Advanced Critical and Cultural Studies, Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth Program

Presenting material from an in-progress dissertation chapter in a paper entitled "There Is No Future, There Is No Past: Cripping Chronicity and the Death Drive in the AIDS Musical." 

Presenting my paper "Cut them apart": Conjoinment, Conservation, and Aesthetics in Side Show' the session, 'Pre-Existing Conditions: Transhistorical Approaches to Disability Conservation'. 

Presenting "And the beauty is…": Cripping Aesthetics for Situated Knowledge in The Light in the Piazza n the seminar "Disability Aesthetics: New Directions."

Presenting, "'Today for you, tomorrow for me': Queer Contagion and Crip Chronicity in the AIDS Musical," which investigates chronicity and crip time in Jonathan Larson's Rent; Moderating a Spotlight on GWU Undergraduate Research in Disability Studies panel comprised of students from my Fall 2017 Disability Studies course.

DC Theatre seminar for visiting undergraduates from Centre College and Butler University, organized around the Women's Voices Theater Festival. Students will attend  performances from the regional premiere runs of two  plays in the festival: Danai Gurira's Familiar, at Woolly Mammoth, and Sarah DeLappe's The Wolves, being produced by Studio Theatre. 

Presenting "'Unlimited (I'm Limited)': Impairment, Disability, and Hyper-Capacity in Wicked" in the working session “I’m the Witch, You’re the World:The Stage Witch as a Sign of the Shifting Paradigms of Embodiment.”