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 (DUC). Her research and teaching focus upon 19th-century American literature, feminist disability studies, writing pedagogy, race studies, and the health humanities. Her monograph, Resisting Diagnosis: Women's Disability Literature of the Nineteenth-Century United States, is under advance contract with the University of Michigan Press.
Her book 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, Wolf recently served the Disability Law Journal at UCLA; REPAIR: A Health and Disability Justice Organization; and the Center for Accessible Education. She founded the Disability Studies Reading Group at DUC and has been awarded the Melba Beals Award twice.
Select Teaching Experience
Dominican University of California (Current)
2024-2025 Nominee for Teacher of the Year
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English/Philosophy: “Feminist Disability Ethics in Literature” (in person; fall 2024).
English Honors: “American Transcendentalism” (hybrid; spring 2024).
English/Writing and Research (W1):
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“Writing in the Age of AI: Ethics & Human Connection” (asynchronous; fall 2025); (Service Learning, remote; fall 2025).
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“Education & Belonging” (Service Learning, hybrid or asynch, fall 2023, fall 2024, spring 2025).
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“Disability and Care Work” (hybrid; fall 2022).
English/Advanced Writing & Research (AW):
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“Children’s Literature” (in person; spring 2024, spring 2026).
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“Literary Monsters” (hybrid; spring 2026).
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“Writing in the Age of AI: Ethics & Human Connection” (asynch; fall 2025; spring 2026).
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“Class, Poverty, & Wealth” (Service Learning, hybrid; spring 2025).
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“Food, Community, and Culture” (hybrid; spring 2023).
Performing Arts & Social Change minor:
English Honors: “Theater for Social Change” (Service Learning, in person; spring 2025).
“Dance as Therapy” (Independent study and internship, hybrid; spring 2023).
English: “Shakespeare for Social Change” (Service Learning, in person; fall 2023).
Health Humanities: “Health Humanities Seminar” (in person; spring 2024).
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. ​
Reading texts including Emily Dickinson’s lyric, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, and Frances E.W. Harper’s polemical novel, I argue that women’s disability literature defies formal coherence, especially in moments when the bodyminds of women and Black people are scrutinized. I further reveal that women’s disability literature engages with medical rhetoric to figuratively “diagnose” debilitating systems of the United States, such as slavery, racial prejudice, and patriarchal medicine itself. In other words, women’s literature becomes a tool for social change by redirecting medical modes of blame away from individual bodyminds and towards the body politic.
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.
BOOKS
Forthcoming Resisting Diagnosis: Women’s Disability Literature of the Nineteenth-Century U.S. (under advance contract with University of Michigan Press, Corporealities series; full manuscript submission Dec. 2026).
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PEER-REVIEWED JOURNAL ARTICLES
2026 Wolf. “Race, Disability, and Communal Care.” Literature and Medicine (forthcoming spring 2026).
2025 Wolf. “To Calmly Rest: Frances E.W. Harper’s Sensational Black Disability Poetics.” J19: The Journal of 19th-Century Americanists (forthcoming winter 2025).
2021 Delchamps, Vivian. “Rattlesnake Kinship: Indigeneity, Disability, Animality.” Disability Studies Quarterly, vol.41, no. 4. DSQ. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v41i4.8451.
2019 Delchamps. “‘The Names of Sickness’: Emily Dickinson, Diagnostic Reading, and Articulating Disability.” The Emily Dickinson Journal, vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 106-132.
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BOOK CHAPTERS
2025 Wolf. “Accessible Language in the Writing Classroom.” In Anti-Ableist Composition: Writing Studies and Accessibility in Unprecedented Times. Edited by Psyche Ready and Ada Hubrig, WAC Clearinghouse (forthcoming winter 2025).
2025 Wolf. “Disability and Collective Care in Charlotte Forten’s Civil War Writings.” In Care and Disability: Relational Representations. Edited by Talia C. Schaffer and Chris Gabbard. Routledge, pp. 191-206.
2020 Delchamps. “‘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.
2018 Delchamps. “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.
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REFERENCE WORKS
2025 Wolf. “Disability and Animality.” In Oxford Bibliographies of Disability Studies. Edited by Dr. Jenifer Barclay. Oxford UP (forthcoming fall 2025).
2023 Delchamps. “Invisible Illness Narratives in the United States.” In The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Health Humanities. Edited by Paul Crawford and Paul Kadetz. Palgrave Macmillan.
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PUBLIC SCHOLARSHIP
2025 Wolf. "Preface." Tuxedo: Literature and Arts Journal, edited by Ma'ayan Simon. https://tuxedojournal.wordpress.com/zines/
2023 Delchamps. “Joints and Dashes and Rond de Jambes.” Tuxedo. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pa2i6wCM_aEpJfYQbKlu7xi4-EGK0wdI/view?usp=sharing.
2023 Delchamps. “Early American Disability Studies: Teaching (and Confronting) Internalized Ableism.” Insurrect! Radical Thinking in Early American Studies. https://www.insurrecthistory.com/archives/ngm4uofsyd0cwys3a7nvvj7169nvsv.
BOOK REVIEWS
2023 Delchamps. “Review of Thomas Constantinesco’s Writing Pain in the Nineteenth-Century United States.” In Modern Philology, vol. 122, no. 2. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/727617.
2021 Delchamps. “Review of Clare Walker Gore’s Plotting Disability in the Nineteenth-Century Novel.” In Disability Studies Quarterly, vol. 41, no. 1. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v41i1.
2020 Delchamps. “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
2025 “AlterTheater Partnership Expands Workshop, Internship Opportunities.” Dominican University of California News.
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.
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ARTICLES IN PREPARATION
R&R “Of Quacks and Malingerers: Silas Weir Mitchell’s Fictions of Race and Disability.” Revising and resubmitting to Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, August 2025.
WIP “Queer Crip Narratives of Care in Cecil Dreeme.” Submitting January 2026.
WIP “The Invalid Bachelor: Narratives of Queer/Crip In/Visibility.” Submitting spring 2026.
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Service to the Profession and Disability & Accessibility Consultations
I engage in institutional service that supports a diverse student body and fosters inclusive, cross-disciplinary collaboration. At Dominican, I serve on assessment and curriculum committees, mentor students from historically underrepresented groups, and direct the Performing Arts and Social Change minor. Finally, I founded a Disability Studies Reading Group and subsequently was awarded the Melba Beals Award for Diversity two successive years.
Thanks to my commitment to thinking through issues LLMs may pose to higher education and social justice work, I was recently invited to lead AI Ethics workshops, one for faculty and another for undergraduates.
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At the national level, I contribute service to the profession by reviewing books and manuscripts, presiding over and organizing conference panels, and by serving as a member of MLA Medical Humanities and Health Studies Executive Committee as well as the Health Humanities Consortium’s Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion committee.
In the role of disability advisor, I have served 5+ organizations by assessing program accessibility and organizing trainings. I'm passionate about creatively choreographing anti-ableist and anti-saneist practices in the academy and beyond.
Service to the Profession
EXTERNAL SERVICE
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2025-2029 Executive Committee Member, Medical Humanities and Health Studies, Modern Languages Association
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2025 Manuscript Review, Springer Nature
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2023 Manuscript Review, University of Florida Press
​INTERNAL SERVICE, DUC
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2026 Curriculum & Educational Policy Committee Chair
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2025-2026 Dominican University of California Faculty Federation of Teachers, School of Liberal Arts and Education (LAE) Representative
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2025-2027 Assessment Committee: LAE Representative
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2024-2026 Curriculum & Educational Policy Committee: LAE Representative
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2022-present Chapter Advisor, Sigma Tau Delta Society
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2022-present Member, Diversity Action Group
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2023-2025 Honors Board: LAE Representative​
Disability Advising
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2024-2027
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Advisory Board Member, Research Study: “Enhancing Arts and Recreation Participation among People with Neurodevelopmental Disabilities through Occupational Therapy Consultation.”
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2022-2024
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Member, Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Committee, The Health Humanities Consortium
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2022
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Community Partner Liaison, Social Media Access for All (SoMAA) Disability Studies Inclusion Lab, UCLA
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2021-2022
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Volunteer Organizer, REPAIR: A Disability Justice and Health Organization
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2019-2022
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Member, Ad Hoc Committee on Disability and Accessibility, C19: The Society of 19th-Century Americanists
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2021-2022
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Member, Committee for Disability Studies Seminars, Massachusetts Historical Society
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2021-2022
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Advisory Board Member, UCLA, CAE: The Center for Accessible Education
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2018-2022
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Disability Studies Advisor, The Disability Law Journal at UCLA
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Poetry
2025 Wolf. “Falling in Love with a One-Hundred-Year-Old Sea Witch.”
The engine(idling, issue no. 7, Fall 2025.
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2025 Wolf. “seeds.” Atlanta Review, spring/summer issue.
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Delchamps. 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”
My poems explore disability and chronic illness as generative playgrounds for knowledge as well as sites of pain and vulnerability. Taking inspiration from Emily Dickinson, Ada Limón, H.D., and Mary Oliver (to name a few), I alternate between calling upon a dis/embodied narrator and experimenting with sensory imagery to evoke laughter, hunger, and bewilderment. My chapbook-in-progress, THE BODY IS SWELL, is my attempt at colliding embodymindedness and language.
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