Role: Professor of English Founding Director, Emory Disability Studies Initiative

  Contact: breiss@emory.edu

 Scholarship:
American Literature | Disability Studies | History of Medicine/Psychiatry | Critical Race Theory

Benjamin Reiss is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in English at Emory.  His primary training is in nineteenth-century American literature and cultural studies, and his published work has revolved around issues of race, mental illness, disability, and social marginality from the nineteenth century to the present.  He is the author of The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death and Memory in Barnum's America (Harvard University Press, 2001
repr. 2010) and Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2008).  He is also a co-editor of TheCambridge History of the American Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and has published essays in Social Text, American Quarterly, American Literary History and elsewhere.  His current research project is a cultural and intellectual history of sleep, perhaps the most universal dimension of human vulnerability.