Laurel Daen
Assistant Professor of American Studies
Flanner Hall 1039
Research Interests
- 18th and 19th Century America
- Disability, Health, and Medicine
- Women and Gender
Laurel Daen is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame, where she is affiliated with the John J. Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values. Her research and teaching focus on disability, sickness, medicine, and health in America, primarily during the 18th and 19th centuries. She is currently completing her first book, which examines the exclusion of disabled people from legal and political rights in early America. This book will be published as part of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture’s series at the University of North Carolina Press. Daen’s work has also appeared in the Journal of Social History, Journal of the Early Republic, Early American Literature, History Compass, and Rethinking Modern Prostheses in Anglo-American Commodity Cultures, 1820-1939. Her article for the Journal of the Early Republic won the 2018 Outstanding Article Award from the Disability History Association.
Before coming to Notre Dame, Daen earned her Ph.D. from William & Mary in 2016 and held long-term National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the Massachusetts Historical Society. While at William & Mary, she received the Distinguished Dissertation Award in the Humanities and Social Sciences and the John E. Selby Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Instruction.