Overview
Jenifer Barclay is an Associate Professor of History in the College of Arts & Sciences at the University at Buffalo. She is Associate Director of the University at Buffalo Center for Disability Studies. Jenifer received her Ph.D. in United States History from Michigan State University in 2011. Her research interests include African American History; History of Slavery and Emancipation; Medicine, Disability, and Science; 19th century United States History; Gender and Sexuality. In 2021, her book The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America was published with the University of Illinois Press.
Research Focus
My research places African American history into conversation with the “new” disability history, a field that emphasizes disability as a lived human experience embedded in a set of socially constructed ideas that change over time, across cultures, and in relation to other categories of identity such as race, gender, class and sexuality. This approach is at the heart of my first book, The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America (University of Illinois Press, 2021). This work centers on the lives of disabled enslaved people and the larger metaphorical, ontological links that antebellum Americans forged between disability, race and gender. I read traditional sources “against the grain” to consider the experiences of enslaved people with physical, sensory and psychological disabilities. I also, however, use disability as a category of historical analysis to shed light on nineteenth century racial projects—specifically the ways that anxious whites linked blackness to the resounding stigma of disability to shore up their own racial identity as the prospect of black freedom and citizenship loomed nearer. This process unfolded through pervasive representations of blackness and disability in the laws of slavery, southern discourses of states’ rights medicine, pro- and antislavery political rhetoric and cultural phenomena such as minstrelsy and freak shows.
The research I undertook for my first book led me to question the influence of ableism on the preservation and interpretation of the historical record. How is it that, in the words of historian Douglas Baynton, “disability is everywhere in history once you begin looking for it, but conspicuously absent in the histories we write?” Why is disability enveloped in this paradox? What forces and factors create this dynamic?
During this fellowship year I will continue work on my next monograph, Between Two Worlds: Disability and Segregation in Southern Education from Emancipation to Integration. This project maintains my scholarly focus on the intersections of race, disability, and gender, but pivots toward education in the post-emancipation years. In the wake of the Civil War, the forces of intersectional erasure complicated the lives and educational opportunities of freedpeople with disabilities. Black women played a progressive role in building and sustaining educational programs and spaces for these students that, likewise, has been overlooked in the history of education. The same is also often true of the transnational work of black, Deaf educator Andrew Foster who attended the Alabama School for Colored Deaf, became the first black, deaf graduate of Gallaudet University in 1954, and established over thirty schools for deaf students throughout West Africa. Between Two Worlds will re-center attention on the lives of black students and educators with disabilities and illuminate the development of educational institutions in the South that were doubly segregated by disability and race, the last of which—the Louisiana School for the Blind and Deaf—did not integrate until 1978.