Jenifer Barclay

Assistant Professor
Ph.D., Michigan State University

Curriculum vitae

Jenifer L. Barclay received her Ph.D. in history (2011) from Michigan State University, spending two years as a pre-doctoral fellow at the University of Virginia’s Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies (2009–2011). She also held a postdoctoral fellowship (2011–12) in African American studies at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.

Barclay is an associate editor for Review of Disability Studies: An International Journal, and her current book project, The Mark of Slavery: The Stigma of Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America, deals with both the lived experiences of enslaved people with disabilities as well as the metaphorical, ontological links that antebellum Americans forged between race, gender, and disability as a way to shore up tenuous racial categories and shifting gender relations in the turbulent decades leading up to the Civil War. Her book is under contract with the University of Illinois Press and will appear in the cutting-edge book series Disability Histories.

Her other publications include:

• “Disability, Race, and Gender on the Antebellum Stage,” in Catherine Kudlick, Kim Nielsen, and Michael Rembis, eds., The Oxford Handbook on Disability History (New York: Oxford University Press, in production).
• “Differently Abled: Africanisms, Disability, and Power in the Age of Transatlantic Slavery,” in Jennifer Byrnes and Jennifer Muller, eds. Bioarchaeology of Impairment and Disability: Theoretical, Ethnohistorical, and Methodological Perspectives (New York: Springer Publishing Company, 2017).
• “Bad Breeders and Monstrosities: Racializing Childlessness and Congenital Disabilities in Slavery and Freedom,” special volume of Slavery & Abolition 38, Iss. 2 (2017): 287–302.
• “Mothering the ‘Useless’: Black Motherhood, Disability, and Slavery.” Sandy Magana and Liat Ben Moshe, guest eds., Women, Gender, and Families of Color, 2, No. 2 (Fall 2014): 115–140.
• “The Greatest Degree of Perfection: Disability and the Construction of Race in American Slave Law,” in Rhondda Thomas and Angela Naimou, eds., “Locating African American Literature,” South Carolina Review, 46, No. 2 (Spring 2014): 27–43.