Jessica Colangelo
Assistant Professor
College of Arts, School of Theatre, English, and Creative Writing
Research Areas
- Modernism
- Disability Rights
- Queer Theory
- Pain
- Gender
Summary
Jessica Colangelo (she/her) is a scholar of twentieth century literature, especially modernism. Her work explores the relationships between knowledge, representation, and power, and includes the fields of disability studies, gender and trans studies, critical phenomenology, epistemology, and pain. Her scholarly work includes the monographs Diaphanous Bodies: Ability, Disability, and Modernist Irish Literature (2021) and Agony for Others: On Literature and Pain (2026), as well as the edited collection Joyce Writing Disability (2022). She is also a creative writer, having published in major periodicals across Canada, as well as in her short story collection Beneath the Statue (2020).
Education
PhD, English, The University of Western Ontario, 2018
MA, English, The University of Western Ontario, 2013
BA, English and History, Brock University, 2012
Select Bibliography
BOOKS
Trans–Disabled Modernism. In Progress.
Agony for Others: On Literature and Pain. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2026.
(ed.) The Body Politic in Pain. Peer-reviewed article cluster at Modernism/Modernity Print Plus. 7.3 (2023). https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/body-politic-pain
(ed.) Joyce Writing Disability. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2022.
Diaphanous Bodies: Ability, Disability, and Modernist Irish Literature. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021.
Beneath the Statue. Vancouver: Now or Never, 2020.
ARTICLES AND CHAPTERS
“Reading Thinking Differently: Neuroqueer Representations in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” Forthcoming in The Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies.
“A Bowl of Dust to Eat: The Minnesota Starvation Experiment and the Writing of Hunger.” Forthcoming in Modernist Cultures.
“James Joyce and Disability: Old and New Approaches.” In The Bloomsbury Handbook to James Joyce. Eds. Sam Slote and Valérie Bénéjam. Bloomsbury Academic. Forthcoming.
“Disability and Irish Fiction.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Disability Studies. Ed. David Bolt. Oxford University Press (2026). doi: 10.1093/acrefore/9780197762530.013.ORE_DST-00080.R2
“What is it Like to be a Body in Pain?: Imagining the Other in Virginia Woolf.” Modernism/Modernity 32.4 (2025): 771-791. Print.
“Race, The Future, and The Vote: Gertrude Colmore’s Suffragette Sally.” In Marking Whiteness: Modernity’s Self, Modernism’s Other edited by Sonita Sarker and Jennifer Nesbitt. Clemson University Press, 2025. 179-194. Print.
“Introduction: The Body Politic in Pain.” Modernism/Modernity Print Plus 7.3 (2023): np. https://doi.org/10.26597/mod.0248.
“A Private Honesty: Torture and Interiority in the Theatre of Sarah Kane.” NTQ: New Theatre Quarterly 38.4 (2022): 379-393. Print.
“Two Sides of Hemiplegia: On the Affect of Paralysis in Dubliners.” In Joyce Writing Disability. Ed. Jeremy Colangelo. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2022. 25-44. Print.
“Introduction: Disability Writing Joyce.” In Joyce Writing Disability. Ed. Jeremy Colangelo. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2022. 1-24. Print.
“Tactics of Dwelling: Alterity and the Room in Tender Buttons.” Textual Practice 36.8 (2022): 1374-1392. Print.
“Waking from History: The Nation’s Past and Future in Finnegans Wake.” In The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Modernism. Eds. Maud Ellmann, Sîan White, and Vicki Mahaffey. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2021. 67-81. Print.
“Clear Indistinct Ideas: Disability, Vision, and the Diaphanous Body in Joyce’s Ulysses.” Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 53.1 (2020): 1-26. Print.
“Punctuations of the Virtual: Spectating Sex and Disability in Joyce’s ‘Nausicaa.’” Modern Fiction Studies 65.1 (2019): 111-131. Print.
“The Mote in God’s i: Fourier, Fractals, and Imaginary Numbers in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia.” Modern Drama 62.2 (2019): 191-207. Print.
“Nothing is Impossible: Bergson, Beckett, and the Pursuit of the Naught.” Journal of Modern Literature 40.4 (2017): 38-50. Print. Republished in On Beckett, On! Eds. Jean-Michel Rabaté and Laurel Garver. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2025. 13-25.
“Textual Authority and Diagnostic Joyce: Re-Reading the Way We Read the Wake.” Joyce Studies Annual (2016): 65-83. Print.
“The Progress of ‘Faustus and Helen’: Crane, Whitman, and the Metropolitan Progress Poem.” The Canadian Review of American Studies 46.2 (2016): 182-201. Print.
“The Grotesque Gigantic: Stephen Hero, Maximalism, and Bakhtin.” Joyce Studies Annual (2014): 63-92. Print.