I read traditional sources “against the grain” to consider the experiences of enslaved people with physical, sensory and psychological disabilities. This work centers on the lives of disabled enslaved people and the larger metaphorical, ontological links that antebellum Americans forged between disability, race and gender. This approach is at the heart of my first book, The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America (University of Illinois Press, 2021). My research places African American history into conversation with the “new” disability history, a field that emphasizes disability as a lived human experience embedded in a set of socially constructed ideas that change over time, across cultures, and in relation to other categories of identity such as race, gender, class and sexuality.
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