How different is reading by sight from listening to an audiobook or reading braille, and do those differences matter? Most of us don’t think much about such questions today because contemporary ideas about reading are biased toward the visual. Beginning from collections of raised-print books made for nineteenth-century blind readers, Sari Altschuler asks how centering the experiences, epistemologies, and texts of disabled readers in the past opens up our ideas about reading practices both past and present. By pressing us to think differently about fundamental practices like reading, such disability histories open up new literary histories, too.

Sari Altschuler is associate professor of English and founding director of the Health, Humanities, and Society Program at Northeastern University. Altschuler is the author of Before Disability: A History of American Citizenship (University of Pennsylvania Press, June 2026) and The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). With Jonathan Metzl and Priscilla Wald, she is co-editor of Keywords for Health Humanities (NYU Press, 2023) and, with Corinna Treitel, co-editor of Health Humanities: An Introduction (under contract with NYU Press). She has written multiple essays for leading journals including PMLA, American Literature, and the medical journal the Lancet as well as essays for American Literary History, Early American Literature, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Journal of the Early Republic, and ISLE. Altschuler serves or has served on the boards of American Literature, American Quarterly, Early American Literature, J19, Literature and Medicine, and ISLE. She has received awards from the Society of Early Americanists, the Society for the Historians of the Early American Republic, the Disability History Association, the Melville Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the American Literature Society and long-term funding from the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the American Antiquarian Society, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, and the Wellesley College Newhouse Center for the Humanities. In 2020 she was an invited professor at the Université Paris Cité.

Currently she directs Touch This Page! Making Sense of the Ways We Read, an award-winning multi-local and online exhibition about the multisensory experiences of reading with David Weimer and chairs the Critical Health Humanities seminar at Harvard University’s Mahindra Humanities Center with Amy Boesky and David Jones.