American Antiquarian Society
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United States
In this hybrid program, Sari Altschuler traces the history of disability rights in the US—from the wake of the American Revolution, when many of the differences we now call disabilities could be accommodated into citizenship, to the antebellum period, when disability was becoming a powerful, racialized tool of civic exclusion, to the end of the nineteenth century, when it was a target for eugenic elimination. Using the literary, legal, and cultural history of disability, race, and citizenship, Altschuler shows how disability helped to shape US citizenship and, in turn, how the formation of US citizenship shaped disability.
Sari Altschuler is associate professor of English and founding director of the Health, Humanities, and Society Program at Northeastern University. She is the author of The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States (2018) and Before Disability: A History of American Citizenship (2026), and co-editor of Keywords for Health Humanities (2023). Altschuler was a Legacy Fellow at AAS in 2011-12 and a Hench Post-Dissertation Fellow in 2013-14. She was elected to AAS membership in October 2025.