Dr. Vivian Delchamps Wolf
Assistant Professor of English, Dominican University of California
Vivian Delchamps Wolf (PhD, UCLA English, 2022) is an Assistant Professor of English (Rhetoric and Composition) at Dominican University of California. Her research and teaching focus upon 19th-century American literature, feminist disability studies, writing pedagogy, race studies, and the health humanities. Her monograph, Undiagnosable: Women's Disability Literature of the Nineteenth-Century United States, argues that women writers of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras repurposed medical methods to explore disabled embodiment, directing diagnostic scrutiny away from individual bodyminds and towards institutions that reinforce white, male, abled supremacy. A dancer as well as disability justice advocate, Delchamps recently served the Disability Law Journal at UCLA; REPAIR: A Health and Disability Justice Organization; and the Center for Accessible Education.
Select Teaching Experience
Dominican University of California (Current)
English & Performing Arts and Social Change (cross-listed)
Shakespeare for Social Change (Service Learning)
Performing Arts and Social Change
Dance as Therapy Independent study
English
Children's Literature. EC 2, Advanced Writing and Research
Education and Belonging. EC 1, Writing and Research (Service Learning)
Food, Community, and Culture. Effective Communication (EC) 2, Advanced Writing and Research
Disability and Care Work. EC 1, Writing and Research
McGovern Center for Humanities and Ethics (2022)
Summer Humanities Seminar: Medical Humanities course for medical students at UTHealth Houston.
UCLA Teaching Fellow (2017-2022)
English Composition Department
Writing with Care: Writing I
English & Disability Studies Departments (Cross-Listed)
Extraordinary Bodyminds: Race, Gender, and Disability in American Literature
Race, Gender, and Disability in 19th and 20th-Century American Literature
English Department
Crip Theory: Diagnosis and Disability in American Literature; Writing II Requirement
Honors Course: Bioethics and Disability in American Literature; Writing II Requirement
Dance and Literature: Writing II Requirement
Disability and the Body in American Literature; Writing II Requirement
American Literature and the Body; Writing II Requirement
Disability Studies Department
Perspectives on Disability Studies; Writing II Requirement
Research
My research project reads select nineteenth-century American writers as disability theorists, analyzing texts which, I argue, articulate realities of disabled life and simultaneously disrupt a diagnostic gaze. While access to diagnosis can be a privilege, diagnosis is also a tool of ableism, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy used to justify violence. The project therefore intervenes in scholarship (in disability studies, literary criticism, the health humanities, and beyond) that uses the methods of close reading to diagnose authors and characters. Ambiguous literary utterances of symptoms provide opportunity to ask how the concept of undiagnosability produces knowledge about disability as a complex web of embodied and social relations that strategically, frustratingly, tragically bewilders medical epistemologies. The project further argues that nineteenth-century texts experiment with diagnosis-like narrative methods not to label individuals, but to identify systemic sources of mass debilitation.
Publications
Note: Should your institution not provide you with access to any of these articles, please feel free to request them from me via email.
PEER-REVIEWED JOURNAL ARTICLES
“Accessible Language in the Writing Classroom.” Writing Across the Curriculum Journal (Forthcoming spring 2024).
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2021: “Rattlesnake Kinship: Indigeneity, Disability, Animality.” Disability Studies Quarterly, vol. 41, no. 4. DSQ. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v41i4.8451.
2019: “‘The Names of Sickness’: Emily Dickinson, Diagnostic Reading, and Articulating Disability.” The Emily Dickinson Journal, vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 106-132.
BOOK CHAPTERS AND REFERENCE WORKS
2023: “Invisible Illness Narratives in the United States.” In The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Health Humanities. Edited by Paul Crawford and Paul Kadetz. Palgrave Macmillan.
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2020: “‘A Slight Hysterical Tendency’: Performing Diagnosis in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’” In Performing Hysteria: Images and Imaginations of Hysteria. Edited by Johanna Braun. Leuven UP, pp. 105-122.
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2018: “Teaching Poetry Through Dance.” In Poetry and Pedagogy Across the Lifespan: Disciplines, Classrooms, Contexts. Edited by Sandra Lee Kleppe and Angela Sorby. Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 37-55.
BOOK REVIEWS AND PUBLIC SCHOLARSHIP
2023: "Early American Disability Studies: Teaching (and Confronting) Internalized Ableism." Insurrect!
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2023: Review of Thomas Constantinesco’s Writing Pain in the Nineteenth-Century United States. In Modern Philology. Forthcoming fall 2023.
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2021: Review of Clare Walker Gore’s Plotting Disability in the Nineteenth-Century Novel. In Disability Studies Quarterly, vol. 41, no. 1. DSQ. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v41i1.
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2020: Review of Sari Altschuler’s The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States. In Pacific Coast Philology, vol. 55, no. 1, pp. 102-106.
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INTERVIEWS
2023: Interview, “English Professor’s Research Focuses on ‘Invisible Illnesses.’” Dominican University of California News.
2020: Interview, “Vivian Delchamps: Disability and Medical Diagnosis in 19C American Lit.” H-Net Civil War.
Poetry
Broken Antler (2024):
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Reformatting the Pain Scale: A Print Anthology (2023):
“Disabled Joy.”
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Magnets and Ladders (2023):
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Last Stanza Poetry Journal (2022):
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Shotglass Poetry Journal (2022):
“perpetual adolescence”
“Written Just Before”
