Rachel Adams

Rachel Adams

Rachel Adams is a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. Her most recent books are Raising Henry: A Memoir of Motherhood, Disability, and Discovery (Yale University Press, 2013) and, coedited with Benjamin Reiss and David Serlin, Keywords for Disability Studies (NYU Press, 2015).


Advertisement

Writing on Public Books

Who Is Sick and Who Is Well?

I might be tempted to describe Terese Mailhot’s new memoir, Heart Berries, as “raw,” had she not warned against it. “The danger politically or artistically is that …

Who Is Sick and Who Is Well?

I might be tempted to describe Terese Mailhot’s new memoir, Heart Berries, as “raw,” had she not warned against it. “The danger politically or artistically is that …

Disability Narratives

Ask most people living with a disability to name their least favorite question and “what happened to you?” will be high on the list. “Wanting to educate yourself about disability and learn more is great, but there’s a time and a place,” writes Erin Tatum in Everyday Feminism magazine. “You should have enough sensibility and […]

A World Where We Are All Autistic

On a memorable spring evening in 2002, the philosopher Peter Singer welcomed disability rights advocate Harriet McBryde Johnson to speak at Princeton University. The event was controversial, given that Singer had publicly claimed that parents should be allowed to euthanize children with severe disabilities, and that Johnson was herself severely disabled. Born with muscular dystrophy […]