Ellen Samuels

Degrees and Institutions:

• B.A., English and Women’s Studies, Oberlin College
• M.F.A., Creative Writing, Cornell University
• Ph.D., English, University of California-Berkeley

Selected Publications:

• “Passing, Coming Out, and Other Magical Acts.” Negotiating Disability Awareness: Disclosure and Higher Education. University of Michigan Press, forthcoming 2017.
• “Prosthetic Heroes: Curing Disabled Veterans in Iron Man 3 and Beyond.” Disability Media Studies: Media, Popular Culture, and the Meanings of Disability. New York University Press, forthcoming 2016.
• “‘Speaking as a Deaf Person Would’: Translating Unperformability in Betty Quan’s Mother Tongue.”Amerasia Journal 39.1 (2013): 19-32.
• “Examining Millie and Christine McKoy: Where Enslavement and Enfreakment Meet.” Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society 37.1(Autumn 2011): 53-81.
  • Recipient of the Catharine Stimpson Prize for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship.
• “Reading Race Through Disability: Slavery and Agency in Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson and ‘Those Extraordinary Twins.’” The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Oxford, 2012. 59-80.
• “My Body, My Closet: Invisible Disability and the Limits of Coming-Out Discourse.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 9.1-2 (Spring 2003): 233-255.
  • Reprinted in The Disability Studies Reader, 4th ed. (Routledge, 2013).
  • Translated into Czechoslovakian in Antologie textů z oboru disability studies. Ed. Katerina Kolarova. Prague: Slon, 2012.
  • Translated into Hebrew by the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, 2016.
• “Critical Divides: Judith Butler’s Body Theory and the Question of Disability.” National Women’s Studies Association Journal 14.3 (Fall 2002): 58-76.
  • Reprinted in Feminist Disability Studies (Indiana University Press, 2011).

Scholarship and Current Projects:

Ellen Samuels is a founding member of the UW Disability Studies Initiative and current Faculty Director of the Open House Gender Learning Community. Her critical work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Feminist Disability Studies, GLQ, MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States, The Disability Studies Reader, and Amerasia. Her awards include the Ed Roberts Postdoctoral Fellowship in Disability Studies, the Catherine Stimpson Prize for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship, and two Lambda Literary awards. She is working on two new books, Double Meanings: Representing Conjoined Twins and Body of Mine: A Memoir in Genetic Sequence.

Double Meanings: Representing Conjoined Twins analyzes representations of conjoined twins in literature, film, history, and popular culture from the nineteenth through twenty-first centuries. The guiding principle for this project is to reverse the sensationalism usually attached to public discussions of conjoinment by turning the lens of fascination back onto the cultural meanings attached to representations of such twins. I explore what these representations tell us about the workings of power in different cultural settings, especially as conjoinment intersects with more familiar identities of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Thus I turn away from broad philosophical questions to explore such historically-located areas of inquiry as colonialism, enslavement, sexual science, modern consumerism, and globalization.

Teaching

GWS 310: The Cultural Politics of Illness
GWS 340: Queer Bodies
GWS 370: Topics in Gender and Disability
GWS 445: The Body in Theory
ENG 407: Creative Nonfiction Workshop
ENG 245: Literature and Disability
GWS/ENG 737: Feminist Disability Studies
ENG 971: The Body in 19th-Century American Literature

Recent Books:

Fantasies of Identification: Disability, Gender, Race. New York University Press, 2014.

Combining literary analysis, legal history, and visual culture, Ellen Samuels traces the evolution of the “fantasy of identification”—the powerful belief that embodied social identities are fixed, verifiable, and visible through modern science. From birthmarks and fingerprints to blood quantum and DNA, she examines how this fantasy has circulated between cultural representations, law, science, and policy to become one of the most powerfully institutionalized ideologies of modern society.