“Aphasic Philology: A Disability Poetics and the Emerson-Whitman Connection” (Chapter). The Emerson Handbook. Ed. Christopher Hanlon. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2024).

This chapter proposes a strain of thought in Emerson’s corpus I describe as “aphasic etymology,” a studied devotion to concealed histories of linguistic meaning, attuned to our inability to excavate all we attempt to express. I trace this interest in etymological estrangement through Emerson’s essay, “The Poet” (1844), focusing on his comparison of poetry to etymology. Here collective memory loss becomes the landscape of speech itself. “The Poet” thus makes room for a social model of aphasic etymology, resituating the “fossil poetry” embedded in language as a forgetting commons. “Poetry” is the means of accessibility that endeavors to traverse these spectral distances. This chapter concludes by using the concept of aphasic etymology to reframe Emerson’s relationship with Walt Whitman.

“Coloring outside the Lines: The Comic Valentine as a Queer and Gender Variant Object.” (Chapter). American Contact: Intercultural Encounter and the History of the Book. Eds. Rhae Lynn Barnes and Glenda Goodman. (Philadelphia: Penn Press, 2024).

“An Idle Criticism: Whitman as Disability Theorist in ‘How I Get around at 60, and Take Notes’” (Chapter). The Whitman Handbook. Eds. Kenneth Price and Stefan Schöberlein. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2024).

On August 18, 1879, Whitman wrote to tell Anne Gilchrist about a new manuscript called “Idle Days and Nights of a Half-Paralytic.” Over the next few years, the concept would morph into a more expansive autobiography titled Specimen Days (1882), characterized within as the “most wayward, spontaneous, fragmentary book ever printed.” However, prior to this better-known iteration, Whitman published something closer to the focused 1879 ambition as a six-part series titled “How I Get Around at 60, and Take Notes” in Jeannette and Joseph Gilder’s magazine The Critic, beginning in January 1881. This series deserves recognition for the contribution it makes to a genealogy of disability theory.

"Review: Contingent Figure: Chronic Pain and Queer Embodiment,” by Michael Snediker,” Genre, Fall 2022.

“A Queer Crip Method for Early American Studies.” American Literature in Transition, 1770-1828. Cambridge UP, 2022. pp. 327-52.

What do Deborah Sampson/Robert Shurtliff, Charity Bryant, Sylvia Drake, and Fitz-Greene Halleck all share in common? Each illustrates the need for a queer crip method in early American studies. Too often, disciplinary conventions have isolated the queer past from disability history. Stories of gender variance and sexual difference have deployed ableist rhetorics to legitimize recuperation. Meanwhile, histories of disability have highlighted the way pre-industrial divisions of labor led families to make accommodations for disabilities without challenging heterosexist suppositions about what counts as kinship. This chapter examines the discursive tools of self-fashioning, erotic built interiors, and sensorial aesthetics that early national figures harnessed to compose queer disabled livelihoods. In a reconsideration of the focus on (de)pathologization in queer theory and disability studies, I propose a method attuned to sites of microhistorical transition, where queer disabled embodiment permitted a tailoring of one’s world to identities, intimacies, and forms of communication otherwise unattainable.

“Fictions of Health after Miasma.” Climate and American Literature. Ed. Michael Boyden. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2021. pp. 194-209.

In an analysis of Rebecca Harding Davis’s little-known novel Dr. Warrick’s Daughters (1896) and Fitz-James O’Brien’s “The Diamond Lens” (1858), I discuss how writers processed shifting understandings of infectious disease in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, during the decline of public health practices oriented toward miasma and the rise of germ theories. I take particular interest in the skepticism Davis and O’Brien express regarding the dominance of the microscope as a tool for circumscribing the meaning and target of modern medicine and its consequences for climatic health discourse.

“Is the Face Mask a Muzzle? A Brief History.” Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal, 27 July 2020.

Prompted by disputes over face mask mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic, this essay examines the comparison of face masks to muzzles through the lens of rabies history. The use of the analogy to argue against mask mandates is misleading for obvious reasons. I ask: despite the deficiencies in this rhetorical posture, is there anything a history of the muzzle can actually teach us about our present moment? In fact, before widespread vaccination of dogs, muzzling ordinances, used to keep roaming pets from biting and to establish protocol for dogcatchers rounding up strays, became a pivotal public health strategy for curtailing rabies transmission in a measurable and sustainable form, with the goal of eradication in places like London and New York. In addition, I propose that a history of the muzzle and its attendant fears helps illuminate one of the most important functions of the face mask in 2020: face masks do not suppress speech, but they do aptly visualize the merits of listening.

“Walt Whitman’s Gift.” Lapham’s Quarterly, 8 April 2020.

One of three paintings by Herbert Gilchrist displayed in the Kislak Center for Special Collections at the University of Pennsylvania, “The Tea Party” dwells in a nebulous state of suspended conversation. No one looks at each other. Anne Gilchrist, the painter’s mother, sits on Walt Whitman’s left side, staring thoughtfully above his head. Grace, Herbert’s youngest sister, glances out at the viewer with an elegant boredom. In a posture of still meditation, Walt Whitman smells a red flower. Among Gilchrist’s and Whitman’s friends at the time of the painting’s creation, 1882–84, the import of the scene would have been inseparable from the story of Herbert’s notably absent older sister, the widely connected and beloved physician Dr. Beatrice Gilchrist.

“Hydrophobia’s Doppelgänger: Toward a Literary History of Emotions in Early American Rabies Narratives.” Literature and Medicine, Spring 2019.

“Hydrophobia’s Doppelgänger” explores how phobia emerged as a familiar medical diagnostic in the United States and Atlantic world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Before phobia developed into a variable suffix that could attach to different objects and ideas, its meaning took shape in literature on rabies. Until the late 1800s, the common name for rabies among English speakers was hydrophobia. Transliterated from the Greek, the term was used to designate a dread of liquids, prompted by difficulties in swallowing—a symptom doctors considered the most familiar form the disease took. By the late eighteenth century a diagnostic twist had taken effect: many physicians agreed that one could acquire hydrophobia without being bitten. Doctors called this subspecies "spontaneous hydrophobia." This article argues that phobia's variability as a concept grew in dialogue with case studies documenting the phenomenon of spontaneous rabies.

“Dread: The Phobic Imagination in Antislavery Literature.” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, Spring 2019.

This article examines how abolitionists developed a rhetorical tradition revolving around the terms colorphobia and Negrophobia to posit a psychological basis for race prejudice. Early on, satire served as the dominant mode. Soon, the rhetoric of phobia began to encompass a logic of public health activism as well. American writers began to conceptualize antislavery and other equality-oriented print cultures as technologies of social inoculation, safeguarding democracy through the circulation of textual immunities. Rather than seeing these satirical and medicinal uses as divisible from one another, I argue that they coalesced in a dynamic assemblage and are best interpreted as lay experimentations with the vernacular adaptability and cultural capital of medical nomenclature.

“Whitman and Disability: An Introduction,” co-written with Clare Mullaney. Special Issue: Revisiting the Whitmanian Body at 200: Memory, Medicine, Mobility. Common-place. Eds. Don James McLaughlin and Clare Mullaney. Vol. 19, No. 1 (Spring 2019).

Coinciding with the Whitman bicentennial, our introduction argues for putting Whitman scholarship in conversation with nineteenth-century disability history.

“Convalescent Calamus: Paralysis and Epistolary Mobility in the Camden Correspondence with Peter Doyle.” Common-place. Eds. Don James McLaughlin and Clare Mullaney. Vol. 19, No. 1 (Spring 2019).

In 1897, one of Walt Whitman's literary executors Richard Maurice Bucke published a volume of the poet's correspondence with Peter Doyle. In this essay, I explore the volume's significance to understanding the aesthetics of paralysis Whitman crafted in his writing and relationships following his stroke in January 1873.

"Review: Circulating Queerness: Before the Gay and Lesbian Novel by Natasha Hurley,” American Literary History, Review Series XVI, Fall 2018.

"Inventing Queer: Portals, Hauntings, and Other Fantastic Tricks in the Collected Folklore of Joel Chandler Harris and Charles Chesnutt."  American Literature, vol. 89, no. 1,  Mar. 2017, pp. 1-28.

Through an analysis of Little Mr. Thimblefinger and His Queer Country (1894) by Joel Chandler Harris and The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales (1899) by Charles Chesnutt, this essay accounts for a late nineteenth-century genre termed the queer fantastic. In so doing, it suggests that in the late nineteenth century, the term queer, as a signifier of distorted time, became central to debates over race and the nature of folkloric belonging.

"The Anti-Slavery Roots of Today's -Phobia Obsession." The New Republic, 29. Jan. 2016. 

Adapted from my dissertation, this article connects modern progressive lexicons revolving around the rhetoric of social phobia to the abolitionist newspapers of Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Charles Bennett Ray, Samuel Cornish, and others. 

"Schoolgirl Smashes, David-and-Jonathan Relationships, and Champagne Friendships: Mining the Archive for LGBT History." (Special Issue: Pennsylvania Pride: LGBT Histories of the Commonwealth.) Legacies: Magazine of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, vol. 16, no. 1, Jun. 2016, pp. 12-19. (Co-authored with Connie King)

LGBTQ history in Pennsylvania is deep-rooted and diverse, encompassing the experiences of elites, celebrities, and leaders in arts and politics as well as those of the poor and marginalized. This special issue of Legacies explores a few episodes and individuals in Pennsylvania's past that shed light on this history. (Historical Society of Pennsylvania website)