Eden Rea-Hedrick is a queer, neurodivergent scholar who studies the imbrication of disability and queerness in literature, film, and culture of the twentieth century and a teacher and organizer who advocates for access-centered pedagogy across the university. They are currently a joint Ph.D. candidate in the departments of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University.
Eden’s dissertation, Cripples of Sex: Disability at the Queer Midcentury, recuperates disability discourses in queer culture of the mid-twentieth century United States and Britain, a period when the rise of homosexuality’s figuration as mental illness increasingly assigned queer subjects to the category of disability. Cripples of Sex argues that midcentury queer creatives who claimed rather than rejected disability identification enacted rich, sometimes transformative intellectual investigation of the nature of (dis)ability itself; their work represents an underexplored site of disabled meaning-making.
A second book project, provisionally titled The Cinema of Ability: A Crip History of the Biopic, still more explicitly connects Eden’s interests in disability theory, queer history, film studies, and adaptation, examining the role of the biopic film genre in shaping popular attitudes about the relationship between (dis)ability and individual achievement. Eden’s other current research includes a project on executive function and the teaching of writing. Their work has been supported by Yale LGBTS’ Fund for Lesbian and Gay Studies (FLAGS) and has appeared in Modernism/modernity, Genre, The Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, and more.
Eden is a passionate teacher, organizer, and administrator whose pedagogy centers joy, inclusion, and accessibility. They serve as the Graduate Assistant Director of the Yale College Writing Center, a McDougal Teaching Fellow in the Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning, and a Graduate Mentor in Yale’s Office of Educational Opportunity. They find their greatest fulfillment in teaching adult returning learners through the Yale Prison Education Initiative and the Warrior-Scholar Project. They are also a founding member and co-facilitator of Yale’s Disability Studies Community Working Group and an organizer for the annual Disability and Accessibility at Yale Symposium.
Eden holds an M.A. and an M.Phil. in English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Yale University and a B.A. in English from Indiana University. When not writing or teaching, they can be found reading voraciously, knitting mediocrely, and spoiling their little dog, Wilkie Collins.
Eden Rea-Hedrick 