Laurel Daen

Laurel Daen is a historian and disability studies scholar specializing in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. She received her Ph.D. in History from William & Mary and her B.A. in History from Wesleyan University. Before joining the faculty at Notre Dame, Daen held two National Endowment for the Humanities postdoctoral fellowships at the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture in Williamsburg, Virginia. At Notre Dame, she is an assistant professor of American Studies with concurrent appointments in Gender Studies; History and Philosophy of Science; and Health, Humanities, and Society.

Daen’s first book, Disability Activism in the Early United States, is currently in production with the University of North Carolina Press as part of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture’s book series. The monograph charts the rise and containment of disabled people’s advocacy in the decades following the American Revolution. In the British colonies and early United States, people with perceived physical and mental disabilities faced a host of legal, political, and social restrictions, including limitations on voting, marriage, property ownership, and town settlement. Yet the language and circumstances of the Revolution and early republic provided a potent context for resistance. Across the nation, disabled people from diverse backgrounds asserted their liberty, equality, and rights, raising fundamental questions about the legitimacy and enforcement of disability-based restrictions. The book concludes by examining how judges, government officials, and many everyday Americans worked to curtail disabled people’s advocacy and reimpose exclusions, largely by drawing on the seemingly expert and impartial, but also contested, authority of professionalizing physicians.

Beyond this monograph, Daen has published in leading scholarly journals, received numerous awards, and undertaken several collaborative editorial projects. Her articles, which explore lived experiences and societal understandings of disability in early North America, have appeared in the Journal of American History, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Technology and Culture, Journal of Social History, Journal of the Early Republic, and Early American Literature, among other venues. Two of her articles received the Disability History Association’s Outstanding Article or Book Chapter Award in 2018 and 2025. In 2024, Daen was also awarded a National Library of Medicine Grant for Scholarly Works in Biomedicine and Health, funded by the National Institutes of Health. She is currently co-editing The Routledge History of Disability in America, forthcoming in March 2027. Featuring contributions from 46 scholars, the volume traces American disability history from the precolonial period to the present. Daen is also co-editing forthcoming special issues of American Art and The William and Mary Quarterly.

Daen is developing a second monograph, tentatively titled Un/Settled: Boarding Sick and Disabled Strangers in Early New England. The book examines a long-overlooked system of poor relief in the British American colonies and early United States, offering fresh historical perspectives on— and potentially informing more effective responses to—the contemporary crisis of houselessness in America.

At Notre Dame, Daen teaches courses on disability studies and history, early American history, and the history of medicine. She also offers project-based courses in which students design and implement initiatives to improve accessibility, foster inclusion, and raise awareness about disability and ableism on campus.