Faculty and Staff

Michelle Jarman

Michelle Jarman is Professor and Director of Disability Studies at the Wyoming Institute for Disabilities and the current Director of Gender and Women’s Studies in the School of Culture, Gender & Social Justice.  

Dr. Jarman directs the undergraduate Minor in Disability Studies. Established in 2007, the minor has now graduated over 180 students, with 50-60 students actively enrolled.  Dr. Jarman received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2006, with concentrations in disability studies and gender studies. She is an active member of the Society for Disability Studies, Modern Language Association, and the National Women's Studies Association. Her research interests include 20th-century U.S. literature and intersecting cultural representations of disability, gender, and race. Current research focuses on community-based participatory projects, disability memoirs, and reproductive justice. Dr. Jarman’s scholarship has appeared in journals such as Disability Studies Quarterly, Feminist Formations, the Journal of American Culture, and in prominent literary and disability studies anthologies. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled Crip Relations: Intersectionality and Interdependence in Disability Memoirs.

At the University of Wyoming, in addition to ongoing service activities within the College of Health Sciences, Dr. Jarman serves on the UW Inclusion Council and is actively involved in the School of Culture, Gender, and Social Justice.

 

Recent Honors and Awards

2022  University of Wyoming Representative, Academic Management Institute, Colorado and Wyoming Network of Women Leaders (CWNWL)

2021  Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Award, College of Health Sciences

2019  Mortar Board “Top Prof,” University of Wyoming

2019  Leadership in Social Justice Award, Shepard Symposium on Social Justice

2017  Mortar Board “Top Prof,” University of Wyoming

2014  Mortar Board “Top Prof,” University of Wyoming

2014  Bright Star Award for Excellence in Education, Governor’s Council on Developmental Disabilities, Wyoming

2011  Outstanding Teacher Award, College of Health Sciences, University of Wyoming

 

Publications

Co-edited Book

Jarman, M., Monaghan, L. and Quaggin Harkin, A., (Eds.), Barriers and Belonging: Personal Narratives of Disability. Temple University Press, 2017. PDF

 

Co-edited Journal

Jarman, M. and Kafer, A. (Eds) (2014). Special topic: Growing disability studies. Disability Studies Quarterly 34.2. Open access link

 

Selected Journal Articles

Jarman, M., Thompson-Ebanks, V., Singh, R., Boggs, C., Clement, K., and Peter, S. (2023, June). Disability studies, inclusive pedagogy, and universal design for learning: A faculty pilot experience. Disability Studies Quarterly, 42.4. Open access link

Jarman, M., Burman, M., Purtzer, M.A., Miller, K. (2022). “Those lessons learned went right out the window once I was atop the soil where it all happened”: Transformative learning in a study abroad course. Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad, 34.4, 26-52. Open access link

Jarman, M. (2021). Horror as resistance: Reimagining blackness and madness. Special issue edited by Therí Pickens on Blackness and Disability. College Language Association Journal, 64.1, 62-81. PDF

Thompson-Ebanks, V. and Jarman, M. (2017). Undergraduate students with nonapparent disabilities identify factors that contribute to disclosure decisions. International Journal of Disability, Development and Education, 65.3, 286-303. Link to abstract | PDF 

Jarman, M. (2015). Relations of abortion: Crip approaches to reproductive justice. Feminist Formations, 27.1, 46-66. PDF

Jarman, M. and Kafer, A. (2014). Guest editors’ introduction: Growing disability studies: Politics of access, politics of collaboration. Disability Studies Quarterly, 34.2. Open access link

Jarman, M. (2013). Entanglements of disability, ethnicity, and relations: Orienting toward belonging in George Estreich’s The Shape of the Eye. Journal of American Culture, 36.3, 194-205. PDF

Jarman, M. (2012). Cultural consumption and rejection of Precious Jones: Pushing disability into the discussion of Sapphire’s Push and Lee Daniels’s Precious. Feminist Formations, 24.2, 163-185. PDF

Jarman, M. (2012). Disability on trial: Complex realities staged for courtroom drama – the case of Jodi Picoult. Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 6.2, 209-225. PDF

 

Selected Book Chapters

Jarman, M. (2021). Disability rights through reproductive justice: Eugenic legacies in the abortion wars. In Shuttleworth, R. and Mona, L. (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of disability and sexuality (pp. 132-143). New York: Routledge. Taylor & Francis Link | PDF 

Jarman, M. and Thomson-Ebanks, V. (2020). Pedagogies of disability justice: Cognitive accessibility in college classrooms. In Ware, L. (Ed.), Critical Readings in Interdisciplinary Disability Studies: (Dis)Assemblages (pp. 143-155). Springer. Link to abstract | PDF

Jarman, M. (2017). Race and disability in U.S. literature. In Barker, C. and Murray, S. (Eds.), The Cambridge companion to literature and disability (pp. 155-169). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. PDF 

Jarman, M. (2012). Dismembering the lynch mob: Intersecting narratives of disability, race, and sexual menace. In R. McRuer and A. Mollow (Eds.), Sex and disability (pp. 114-139). Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. PDF

Jarman, M. (2011). Coming up from underground: Uneasy dialogues at the intersections of race, mental illness and disability studies. In C. Bell (Ed.), Blackness and disability: Critical examinations, cultural interventions (pp. 9-29). Berlin: LIT Verlag and East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. PDF

Jarman, M. (2010). Narrative displacement: The symbolic burden of disability in Zora Neale Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee. In D.G. Plant (Ed.), “The inside light”: New critical essays on Zora Neale Hurston (pp. 127-137). New York: Praeger. PDF