My research focuses on how disabled people came to be defined as unproductive citizens during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—a definition central to twentieth century disability policy. My book manuscript, "No Right to Be Idle: The Invention of Disability, 1850-1930" (under contract with the University of North Carolina Press and forthcoming in 2016) traces how policymakers, employers, and the general public created disability as a policy problem, synonymous with public dependency.
