红杏视频

Bio

I was born in the seaside district of Shuwaikh, Kuwait, a major commercial port and home to the water desalinization plant serving Kuwait City. My Sikh family lived in nearby Salmiya, a multicultural coastal city that was nearly destroyed during the 1990 Iraqi invasion that sparked the Gulf War. At age four, I contracted bacterial meningitis and became deaf. Two years later, we immigrated to Toronto, where I began school for deaf and hard-of-hearing children before entering mainstream public education. I then studied philosophy at York University before shifting from a brief career in fashion merchandising and marketing to pursue graduate studies at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto, where I received my MA (2008) and PhD (2015). I held several fellowships, including at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and Brock University, before my academic journey took me to the University of Delaware in 2018. In 2025, I joined the University of Victoria.

I describe myself as a scholar activist because I use my research as a tool for influencing public discourse and policy. My work centers on disability in the history of science, technology, and medicine and I am especially interested in how people designed, modified, or adapted technologies as a radical resistance against medical perceptions of disability. I explore these themes in my books, Hearing Happiness (2020) and Echoes of Care (2025) and my next book (with ), Standards of Pure Science examines how disability became central to state medical research in interwar Britain. Currently I am working on my which examines how everyday pain of endometriosis shapes disability experience; part of my study is funded by a CIHR grant to investigate feminist health networks who distributed information about the disease. The second project, Objects of Disability (also with Dr. Coreen McGuire) aims to deepen our understanding of disability through material culture.

Project Websites

Selected Publications

Books & Edited Collections

Echoes of Care: Deafness in Modern Britain (McGill-Queens University Press, 2025)

Disability and the History of Science, Osiris 39 (University of Chicago Press, 2024), co- edited with Mara Mills and Sarah F. Rose.

Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History (University of Chicago Press, 2020).

• British Society for the History of Science Hughes Prize, 2021
• American Association for the History of Medicine Welsh Award, 2022

Disability and the Victorians: Attitudes, Legacies, Interventions (University of Manchester Press, 2020), co-edited with Iain Hutchison and Martin Atherton.

Recent Articles & Chapters

“Deaf Futurity: Designing and Innovating Hearing Aids,” Medical Humanities 50 (2024): 678-684.

“‘Feel Dumb, Don’t Cry’: Inside the Soundproof Grey Room,” in Edward F.J. Allen (ed.), Modern Fiction, Disability and the Hearing Silences (Routledge, 2024).

“Brett & Toby: Asserting the Disabled Gaze,” Winterthur Portfolio 57.1 (2023): 3-47.
            Recipient of the Disability History Association Best Article Award

“Public Scholarship as Disability Justice,” in Mara Mills and Rebecca Sanchez (eds.), Crip Authorship: Disability as Method (NYU Press, 2023).

“Dorothy Brett’s Leather Case,” in Elizabeth Guffey (ed.), After Universal Design: The Disability Design Revolution (Bloomsbury, 2023).

“Colonial Histories of Plant-Based Pharmaceuticals,” with Geoff Bil, History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals 63.2 (2022).

“How Can We Write the History of Disability?” in Helen Carr and Suzannah Lipscomb, What is History, Now? How the Past and Present Speak to Each Other (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2021).

“Respiratory Technologies and the Co-Production of Breathing in the Twentieth Century,” with Coreen McGuire and Jenny Hutton,” in Anne Hanley and Jessica Meyer (eds.), Patient Voices in Britain, 1840-1948 (Manchester University Press, 2021).

“Material Traces of Disability: Andrew Gawley’s Steel Hands,” Nuncius: Journal of the Material and Visual History of Science 35.3 (2020): 606-631).

Recent Public Engagement

, “Disability and the History of Science,” with Clayton Jarrard (18 January 2025).

“New Trials Aim to Restore Hearing in Deaf Children—With Gene Therapy” (20 October 2023).

“Disability History & Deaf Futures” (8 November 2022).

“Why Hearing Aids are So Expensive?” (5 November 2022).

“John Fetterman Gives Us a Chance to Banish Eugenic Ideas of Fitness,” Washington Post (4 November 2022).

“The FDA’s New Hearing Aid Won’t Solve the Bigger Problems in the Market,” (25 August 2022).

WBUR), “The Unintended Consequences of Over-The-Counter Hearing Aids,” with Celeste Headlee (17 August 2022).

“The Unintended Consequences of OTC Hearing Aids.” (16 August 2022).

(WNYC Studios), “The Helen Keller Exorcism,” with Lulu Miller (11 March 2022).