The Disability, Debility, and Crip Theory Working Group brings together graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and researchers, as well as faculty members to discuss disability studies in our contemporary moment, share work in progress, and foster community among disability studies scholars in diverse fields and at different stages of their career at Princeton. An intersectional approach is pertinent to this working group–our areas of interest range from disability and race, queer/trans/crip studies, justice and policy, mobility and migration, postcolonial studies, feminist theory, film and media, aesthetics and artistic practice, performance studies, and philosophies of language. Members of the working group support cross-disciplinary dialogue with their experience across the departments of African American Studies, Politics, History, Comparative Literature, Interdisciplinary Humanities, French & Italian, Philosophy, and Art & Archaeology, among others. The working group meets monthly to build upon our understandings of disability/debility, exchange texts, and respond to our colleagues’ work in the field in a way that encourages testing out new ideas. The group is open to anyone interested in disability studies, please contact Sonya Merutka at [email protected] for more information or questions.
Sonya Merutka is a Ph.D. student in Art & Archaeology with a focus on performance, queer theory, critical race and disability studies, and poetics within modern and contemporary art. As a recent Helena Rubinstein Fellow in Critical Studies at the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program, they developed a project on language,…
Sophia Millman is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Department of French & Italian. During the 2023-2024 academic year, she is excited to continue teaching French, to work as a fellow at the Writing Center, and to be part of the instructional team for “Introduction to Gender & Sexuality Studies.” She has recently published articles in…
Moad Musbahi is a joint Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology and the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities. He researches the entanglements between bodily ailments, oral performance and financial relations within communities who claim ancestral belonging across Algeria, Libya, Niger and Mali. Taking the title, the …
Jiya is a historian of disability, the body, gender, sexuality, and caste, colonial and post-colonial South Asia, and transnational welfare.
Her dissertation focuses on the centrality of disability welfare to imperialism and nationalism in India between the 1930s and 1990s. Rather than taking "disability" as a bounded, defined term, she…
Aliya Ram is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities, as well as a certificate student in African American Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her work explores the relationships between aesthetic innovation, subject formation and coercive social bonds…
Megan Wicks is a doctoral candidate in Princeton University’s Philosophy Department, who completed their undergraduate degree at Columbia University in New York City. Their work, which sits primarily in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Language, concentrates on hermeneutic methodology and meaning construction.