Laurel Daen

Laurel Daen is a historian and disability studies scholar focused on America during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She received her Ph.D. in History from William & Mary and her B.A. in History from Wesleyan University. Before coming to Notre Dame, Daen held two National Endowment for the Humanities postdoctoral fellowships (for a total of three years of funding) from the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture in Williamsburg, VA. 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, charts the rise and containment of disabled people’s advocacy in the decades after the American Revolution. In the British colonies and new nation, people with perceived physical and mental disabilities faced a host of legal, political, and social restrictions, including from voting, marriage, property ownership, and town settlement. But the language and circumstances of the Revolution and early republic provided a potent context for resistance. Across the nation, disabled people from diverse backgrounds claimed their liberty, equality, and rights, raising countless questions about the implementation and legitimacy of disability-based strictures. The book concludes by showing how judges, officials, and many everyday Americans moved 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.

Disability Activism is under contract with the University of North Carolina Press in the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture’s series. Daen is also co-editing The Routledge History of Disability in America, under contract with Routledge, which features the work of 45 scholars and chronicles American disability history from the precolonial period to the present. Daen has published or forthcoming articles in leading scholarly journals, including 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. She has won the Outstanding Article or Book Chapter Award from the Disability History Association in both 2018 and 2025. Daen’s research has received generous financial support, including a National Library of Medicine Grant for Scholarly Works in Biomedicine and Health funded by the National Institutes of Health in 2024-2025.

Daen is embarking on a second monograph, tentatively titled Boarding and Nursing Strangers: Poverty, Disability, and Homelessness in Early America, which explores a long-overlooked system of poor relief in the American colonies and early United States to offer critical perspective on—and even unexpected solutions for—the crisis in homelessness in America today.

At Notre Dame, Daen teaches courses on disability studies and history, early American history, and the history of medicine. She also teaches project-based courses in which students spearhead and implement initiatives to increase access, inclusiveness, and awareness about disability and ableism on campus.