Neurodiversity
Then and Now
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Though I had always known that some things about me were atypical, in 2022 I learned that I was neurodivergent, when I was formally diagnosed with autism and ADHD. This was a "later-life" discovery, but the implications were profound: all of a sudden, it was like a light turned on, and my life suddenly made much more sense.
While I have always been neurodivergent, the process of learning that I was neurodivergent significantly altered how I understood myself within academia. As I learned more about the challenges that neurodivergent people experience in higher education, I've become increasingly invested in trying to make colleges and universities more accommodating for the range of neurological styles that are represented in their students, staff members, and faculty. On this front, I wrote an essay for The Chronicle of Higher Education called "How to Make Room for Neurodivergent Professors," which can be found here.
I also co-created the "Autism and Academia" listserv. If you'd like to join, let me know.
But as I learned more about my own neurodivergence, I also became interested in neurodiversity as an object of professional study. In the last decade or so, a group of groundbreaking scholars---such as Bridget M. Bartlett, Jes Battis, Alice Equestri, Wes Folkerth, Melissa H. Geil, Nicholas R. Helms, Olivia Henderson, Sonya Freeman Loftis, Mardy Philippian, Jr., Laura Seymour, Robert Shaughnessy, and Lisa Ulevich---have started to explore concepts of neurodiversity in Renaissance literature and culture, and we can say that there's an emerging field of early modern neurodiversity studies. My scholarly efforts are now concentrated in this area of research -- especially because I've come to believe that my work on early modern emotion was already anchored in the concept of human neurodiversity.
I created the Early Modern Neurodiversity Studies Bibliography at earlymodernneurodiversity.org, a crowd-sourced resource that can be a useful starting point for those interested in learning about the field. I also created the Early Modern Neurodiversity Listserv, a discussion forum for students and researchers; if you'd like to join, let me know.
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More generally, I recently launched literaryneurodiversity.org,
a hub for Literary Neurodiversity Studies at large. It contains a broad
bibliography of research that considers literature and neurodiversity.
For an overview of my approach to early modern neurodiversity, you can check out the Keynote Talk I gave at the 2024 conference “Body Matters! Disability in English Literature to 1800."
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I have a variety of projects related to the topic underway. My monograph Literary Neurodiversity Studies: Current and Future Directions will be published by Palgrave in early 2025. Bridget Bartlett and I wrote an essay called "Early Modern Neurodiversity Studies: A Preliminary Research Agenda," which will be published by ELH in Summer 2025. I'm also working on co-editing (with Bridget Bartlett and Laura Seymour) a collection ttitled Neurodivergence in Early Modern English Literature, which will be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2026. More generally, I have a contract to write a short Cambridge Elements book called Historical Neurodiversity Studies: A New Paradigm, which will outline my broader theoretical approach to the study of historical cognition, emotion, and sensation.
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Beyond that, I'm working on a number of writing projects, including essays on keywords of early modern neurodiversity; historical neurotype theory; neurodiversity and Shakespearean character; a neurological reading of Hamlet; and neurodiversity in early modern sonnet sequences.
