About

Jason S. Farr (Ph.D., University of California, San Diego, 2013) researches and teaches courses in British literature and culture of the long eighteenth century, disability studies, gender and sexuality studies, queer theory, deaf studies, and the health humanities. His book, Novel Bodies: Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature (Bucknell UP 2019), examines how fictional representations of physical disability, deafness, and chronic illness shape the literary history of sexuality. Novel Bodies shows that Enlightenment authors employ variably embodied characters in their fiction to intervene in debates ranging from courtship to education, from feminism to medicine, and from kinship to plantation life. At the same time, these novelists, some of whom were themselves disabled, offer keen insight into the lived experiences of disability and non-normative genders and sexualities in the eighteenth century. Dr. Farr’s research has appeared in venues such as Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, and the edited collection, The Idea of Disability in the Eighteenth Century (Bucknell UP, 2014). His public-facing writing appears in Profession, The Rambling, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Before arriving to the Department of English at Marquette University, Dr. Farr served as Assistant Professor of English at Texas A&M University—Corpus Christi in South Texas (2014-18), and prior to that, he taught in the Literature Department at the University of California, San Diego. His courses routinely challenge students to think more expansively about disability, sexuality, gender, race, and variable bodies. Attuned to ongoing conversations about accessibility, he is constantly seeking innovative ways to establish more inclusive classrooms and communities. He has been hard of hearing for more than ten years, and his atypical experience of sound and speech directly informs his research and teaching practices.