https://www.sarialtschuler.com/home daily 1.0 2018-11-19 https://www.sarialtschuler.com/about daily 0.75 2026-01-27 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59bb07f9cf81e04014dde7f1/2bcc42b6-ca7a-465e-97b6-27c62f3d42eb/Altschuler+professional+photo+-+Dec+2023+copy.jpg About - SARI ALTSCHULER is associate professor of English and founding director of the Health, Humanities, and Society Program at Northeastern University. Her research focuses primarily on American literature and culture before 1865, disability studies, and the health humanities, broadly understood. She is the author of Before Disability: A History of American Citizenship (University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming June 2026) and The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). With Jonathan Metzl and Priscilla Wald, she is co-editor of Keywords for Health Humanities (NYU Press, 2023) and, with Corinna Treitel, co-editor of Health Humanities: An Introduction (under contract with NYU Press). She has written multiple essays for leading journals including PMLA, American Literature, and the medical journal the Lancet. Her work has also appeared in venues including American Literary History, Early American Literature, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Journal of the Early Republic, and ISLE. She is coeditor with Priscilla Wald of a forum in American Literature on COVID-19. Altschuler serves or has served on the advisory or editorial boards of American Literature, American Quarterly, Early American Literature, J19, Literature and Medicine, and ISLE. She has received awards from the Society of Early Americanists, the Society for the Historians of the Early American Republic, the Disability History Association, the Melville Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the American Literature Society and long-term funding from the McNeil Center for Early American Studies (University of Pennsylvania), the American Antiquarian Society, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities (with Christopher M. Parsons), Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (with Sophie Vasset), and the Wellesley College Newhouse Center for the Humanities. She was an assistant professor of English and core faculty member of the Center for the Study of Human Health at Emory University before joining the Northeastern faculty, and she was an invited professor at the Université Paris Cité in 2020. Currently she directs Touch This Page! Making Sense of the Ways We Read, an award-winning multi-local and online exhibition about the multisensory experiences of reading with David Weimer and chairs the Critical Health Humanities seminar at Harvard University’s Mahindra Humanities Center with Amy Boesky and David Jones. https://www.sarialtschuler.com/publications daily 0.75 2026-01-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59bb07f9cf81e04014dde7f1/80dbd190-52a9-4909-a665-d94153bb1f8c/Screenshot+2026-01-21+at+1.05.26%E2%80%AFPM.png publications BEFORE DISABILITY: A HISTORY OF AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming June 2026 A literary, legal, and cultural history of disability, race, and citizenship between the Revolution and the Civil War The history of disability rights is often told as a recent one, but it is not. In the wake of the American Revolution, many of the differences we now call disabilities could be accommodated into citizenship—and for some even exemplified its promises. By the antebellum period, however, disability was becoming a powerful, racialized tool of civic exclusion and, by the century’s end, a target for eugenic elimination. In Before Disability, Sari Altschuler tells the story of how this dramatic transformation occurred. Before Disability is a literary, legal, and cultural history of the relationship between disability, race, and citizenship. It shows how disability helped to shape US citizenship and, in turn, how the formation of US citizenship shaped disability. There were two key drivers of the transformation from accommodation to exclusion and eugenics: the difficulty aligning the reality with the rhetoric of civic inclusion and the co-opting of mental and physical difference as evidence in debates about Black citizenship. The stigmatizing ways race came together with mental and physical difference to deny Americans rights were, however, not inevitable. Before citizenship was federally defined in the late 1860s, Americans were still working out what it meant. They used the narrative forms available to them—from melodrama and the gothic to the slave narrative and the criminal confession—to do this work. While possibilities narrowed by the antebellum era, Americans continued to imagine, articulate, and enact broader definitions. As we seek to imagine the relationship between disability and citizenship more equitably and expansively for ourselves, we should begin by remembering that many disabled and nondisabled Americans before us did, too. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59bb07f9cf81e04014dde7f1/1668111081677-GEVU9JJ5980TL3ZODQ1S/Keywords+for+Health+Humanities+-+cover.jpg publications https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59bb07f9cf81e04014dde7f1/1510253470570-TVD5TAE2WTUAZKQ9HV6F/image1%281%29.jpeg publications https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59bb07f9cf81e04014dde7f1/1546981655649-2S0OCJYNLB24KHZ2MQ9L/Screenshot+2017-10-18+22.19.54.png publications https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59bb07f9cf81e04014dde7f1/1642603610442-PDTVLXSZD5VRK1RUG6HP/Screen+Shot+2022-01-19+at+9.43.57+AM.png publications - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59bb07f9cf81e04014dde7f1/ab69da9e-8510-4529-bb5e-e44eeb9bfb05/Lancet+cover%2C+2021.png publications - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59bb07f9cf81e04014dde7f1/1648218406678-KPZNNG28S40TDWR0ZGUB/Screen+Shot+2022-03-25+at+10.25.53+AM.png publications https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59bb07f9cf81e04014dde7f1/1563471410111-2N2EVOPECG50F019M83O/Screenshot+2019-07-18+13.36.21.png publications https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59bb07f9cf81e04014dde7f1/5b8fee04-1db9-4c7a-9f36-1d22045a47b4/MLA+front+cover+oct+2023.jpg publications - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59bb07f9cf81e04014dde7f1/1589471575792-XANWHT4K2K6H7V64A5FH/Screenshot+2017-10-18+22.19.54.png publications https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59bb07f9cf81e04014dde7f1/1546982533991-DTZUVMYYQE4UKH1LBPYL/Screenshot+2019-01-08+16.21.21.png publications https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59bb07f9cf81e04014dde7f1/1548221961955-TFWQLDDZP320QBW8BK3X/Screenshot+2019-01-23+00.38.58.png publications https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59bb07f9cf81e04014dde7f1/1642604707246-62OGDGZ6BKKSYTC8PN6O/Screen+Shot+2022-01-19+at+10.04.27+AM.png publications - SPECIAL ISSUE: “PAIN” - AMERICAN LITERATURE A special issue of American Literature guest edited with Thomas Constantinesco (June 2024). You can read the issue here: https://read.dukeupress.edu/american-literature/issue/96/2 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59bb07f9cf81e04014dde7f1/1591152146009-WU622EFR5LUVXNXQ1VHU/Screenshot+2019-07-18+13.40.34.png publications - SPECIAL ISSUE: "EARLY AMERICAN DISABILITY STUDIES" - EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE A special issue of Early American Literature guest edited with Cristobal Silva (Spring 2017). You can read the introduction here: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/650772 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59bb07f9cf81e04014dde7f1/1645934495747-PCG4P2E8DSTPZ5GBM9KY/Screen+Shot+2022-02-26+at+10.57.00+PM.png publications - SPECIAL ISSUE: "REPUBLICS OF BENJAMIN RUSH" - EARLY AMERICAN STUDIES A special issue of Early American Studies guest edited with Christopher Bilodeau (Spring 2017). You can read the issue here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/e90002036 https://www.sarialtschuler.com/read-me daily 0.75 2025-05-12 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5310cef7e4b08602cbfa36bf/1412689652885-P9TPK298WCTZU748L0SG/Lifestyle03.jpg Read Me https://www.sarialtschuler.com/careers-hayden daily 0.75 2025-05-12 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5310cef7e4b08602cbfa36bf/1410211320490-406ZQFQSXK2C1HEM4F70/Wythe01.jpg Careers