Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and American Culture
About
Dr. Diana Martha Louis’ research pursues the intersections of Disability Studies and Critical Race Studies with respect to issues of mental illness in African American life. Her current project, Colored Insane: Slavery, Asylums and Mental Illness in 19th-Century America examines the impact of major transformations in both American psychiatry and African Americans’ social condition — the end of one of America’s prototypical institutions of confinement and the expansion of another, slavery and asylums, respectively. It tells the story of how nineteenth-century psychiatric discourses made African Americans mad by both constructing disorders according to prevailing notions of race and “insanity,” and inflicting real psychological harm within asylums, plantations, jails, and society writ large. Further, it shows how Black intellectual thought on mental illness often challenged reigning psychiatric beliefs. Colored Insane reveals that multilayered, ubiquitous and ongoing experiences of mental illness (real and imagined) among 19th-century African Americans set the stage for black experiences with mental illness for generations to come.
Dr. Louis is beginning a second project that explores mental illness and psychiatry among blacks at nineteenth-century asylums in other parts of the African Diaspora including Black Rock Hospital in Barbados, West Indies and Lutindi Hospital in Tanzania, East Africa.
Publications
"Black Women's Psychiatric Incarceration at Georgia Lunatic Asylum in the Nineteenth Century" Journal of Women's History 34.1 (Spring 2022)
"Pro-slavery Psychiatry and Psychological Costs of Black Women's Enslavement in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)" Literature and Medicine 39.1 (Fall 2021)
"Bitch You Must Be Crazy: Mental Ilness and Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls Who Consider Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf" The Western Journal of Black Studies 37.3 (Fall 2013)
Research Areas(s)
19th- and 20th century African American literature and culture, global black feminisms, history of medicine, slavery, mental illness, sustainability, and disability
Affiliation(s)
- Faculty: Department of Women's and Gender Studies
- Faculty: Department of American Culture
