I think and write about disability, girlhood, and the media. 

My first book, Cripping Girlhood (winner of the Winner of the 2022 Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in the Humanities), offers a new theorization of disabled girlhood, tracing how and why representations of disabled girls emerge with frequency in twenty-first century U.S. media culture. It uncovers how the exceptional figure of the disabled girl most often appears as a resource to work through post-Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) anxieties about the family, healthcare, labor, citizenship, and the precarity of the bodymind. In paying critical attention to disabled girlhood, the book uses feminist disability studies to rupture the unwitting assumption in girls’ studies that girlhood is necessarily non-disabled.

Read an open access copy of Cripping Girlhood (University of Michigan, 2024)

My new project extends my work on crip digital cultures to think more deeply about disabled youth and their affective attachment to their smartphone, as a material, intimate, and survival object. 

I teach courses like Gender & Disability, Feminist Affect Theory, Feminist Theory, and Girlhood Studies.

In my spare time, I like playing with my cats, I recently got back into reading for fun, and I scroll on my phone way too much, so I am on a quest to try and develop other hobbies that don’t involve a screen (since that is what I research and write about).

You can learn more about me here: anastasiatoddphd.com.