Judith Herb College of Arts, Social Sciences and Education

Distinguished University Professor

The Ability Center of Greater Toledo Endowed University Professor

UH 4390B

419.530.7254

kim.nielsen2@utoledo.edu

education

J.D., University of Toledo
Ph.D. in History, University of Iowa
M.A. in History, University of Iowa
B.A. in History, Macalester College

Research interests:

I am a historian of disability, gender, and law in the United States. The story of the United States is that of numerous peoples seeking to define, implement, and live out democracy.  Specifically, I’m interested in how disabled and other marginalized people have done so while immersed in multiple and complicated power structures.  My expertise includes but is not limited to institutions and institutionalization, Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan Macy, and biography.

Current Projects:

My in-process and forthcoming publications analyze the ways that laws have shaped the lives and civic access of people with disabilities, particularly how ableism was written into state constitutions and family law.  This is part of a larger effort to document analyze opposition to disabled people and disability justice throughout U.S. history.

Selected Books:

• Helen Keller: Autobiographies and Other Writings. New York: Library of America, 2024.
• Money, Marriage, and Madness: The Life of Anna Ott. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2020.
• The Oxford Handbook of Disability History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Co-edited with Michael Rembis and Catherine J. Kudlick. Winner of the 2021 Rosen Prize of the American Association for the History of Medicine and Winner of the 2019 Disability History Association Book Award.
• A Disability History of the United States. Boston: Beacon Press, 2012.
• Beyond the Miracle Worker: The Remarkable Life of Anne Sullivan Macy and Her Extraordinary Friendship with Helen Keller. Boston: Beacon Press, 2009.
• The Radical Lives of Helen Keller. New York University Press, 2004 (paperback 2009).

Selected Articles:  

• “Not Returning to Normalized Injustice: Reflections on Teaching and Learning While Living the Pandemic,” in Katherine Sorrels, et al., eds., Ohio Under Covid (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023): 276-281.
• “Ott v. Ott: Family Violence, Divorce, and Women’s Agency in Nineteenth-Century Wisconsin,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 106/2 (Winter 2022): 11-25. Winner of the William Hesseltine Award for Best WMH Article of the Year.
• “Dr. Anna B. Ott, Patient #1763: The Messiness of Authority, Diagnosis, Gender, and Insanity in Nineteenth-Century America,” Signs 45/1 (Spring 2019): 27-49.
• “Incompetent and Insane: Labor, Ability, and Citizenship in Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century United States,” Rethinking History 23/2 (2019): 175-188.
• “The Perils and Promises of Disability Biography,” in The Oxford Handbook of Disability History, eds. Michael Rembis, Catherine Kudlick, and Kim E. Nielsen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018): 21-40.
• “Property, Disability, and the Making of the Incompetent Citizen in the United States, 1880s–1940s,” ed. Susan Burch and Michael Rembis, Disability Histories (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2014): 308-320.
• “The Southern Ties of Helen Keller,” Journal of Southern History LXXIII, No. 4 (November 2007): 783-806. Winner of the 2007 A. Elizabeth Taylor Prize of the Southern Association of Women Historians for the best article in the field of southern women’s