A feminist scholar of disability, Sarah L. Orsak asks how understandings of what disability is and of who can be disabled are constitutively tied to race and nation. In this interdisciplinary research, Orsak focuses on the relationships between Blackness and disability. 

She is at work on her first book project, a theoretical and cultural analysis of how disability cohered as an identity in the United States through references to Blackness which contingently recognize, but also exclude, Black disability. Orsak’s research has been published in Disability Studies Quarterly and is forthcoming in Feminist Formations.  

 Orsak holds a Ph.D. in women's gender and sexuality studies from Rutgers University–New Brunswick and a bachelor’s degree in the study of women and gender from Smith College. Before joining the faculty at UVA, she was a Rising Scholar Postdoctoral Fellow in UVA’s Department of Women, Gender & Sexuality. 

 This fall, Orsak will teach core courses in WGS that draw on these scholarly interests: how categories of difference shape each other (“Race & Power in Gender and Sexuality”) and what these relations mean for knowledge production (“Research & Methods in Gender and Sexuality”). She also looks forward to continued collaborations as part of the UVA Disability Studies Initiative.