Kathleen Brian, Ph.D.

About

Dr. Kathleen Brian (any/all pronouns) has been with the Honors College since 2019. In addition to teaching the Capstone Project Preparation course and across the Core Sequence, she regularly offers upper-division seminars and advises students in their capstone projects.

Throughout her career, from pursuing her Ph.D. in an interdisciplinary field to curating classrooms that prioritize collaborative inquiry within the experiential and experimental, scrutinizing and transgressing boundary has been Dr. Brian’s predominant motivation. She researches at the intersection of critical disability studies, cultural theory, and histories of medicine and public health. She teaches around themes such as alienation and belonging; systemic violences and relational power; and the transmutation of knowledge as it moves through time and space.

These commitments shape not only her engagement in Honors but also how she participates in the broader communities she inhabits. Dr. Brian was a member of the leadership team that established Western’s Institute for Critical Disability Studies in 2021. She served as the President of the Disability History Association (2020-2023) and collaborated with the National Council on Public History (NCPH) and the National Park Service (NPS) to increase the presence of disability and disabled people in U.S. public history. The edited volume that resulted from that collaboration, Disability in Place, is forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press.

Dr. Brian’s research also appears in journals such as the Bulletin of the History of Medicine and The Activist History Review, and she is co-editor of Phallacies: Historical Intersections of Masculinity and Disability (Oxford UP, 2017). Her current book project, The Quarry: Suicide, Risk, and the Epistemology of Dread, charts the emergence of suicide prevention in the nineteenth-century U.S. by interrogating bureaucratic becomings alongside finance capitalism’s speculative fictions.