Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies Diana Martha Louis won the 2026 Outstanding Book Award from the Disability History Association for her book Colored Insane: Slavery, Asylums, and Mental Illness in the Nineteenth Century.
The Disability History Association writes:
Colored Insane is a powerful example of the fruitful interplay between the history of disability and the history of race. Louis offers a particularly strong combination of methodological innovation and historical significance. Reading Black-authored medical and intellectual writing, slave narratives, fiction, asylum records, and psychiatric texts together, she shows how nineteenth-century psychiatry racialized mental disability while slavery, confinement, and social violence inflicted real psychological harm. Most compelling is her recovery of a Black counter-discourse. Her interdisciplinary integration of literary and historical analysis, disability studies, and Black feminist theory strengthens this original and accessible contribution to disability history.
Read more about the award at the Disability History Association website.
Congratulations, Professor Louis!
