- Dayton, Ohio, United States
- 937-542-1260
Pasquale Toscano
Princeton University, English, Graduate Student
- University of Oxford, Classics, Graduate StudentUniversity of Oxford, English, Graduate StudentWashington and Lee University, English; Classics, Undergraduateadd
- English Renaissance Literature, Early Modern English drama, John Milton, Disability Studies, Classical Reception Studies, Creative Nonfiction, and 15 moreMarilynne Robinson, Latin Literature, Ovid, Formalism, New Criticism, Shakespeare, Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Epic poetry, Heroism, Musical Theater, Tragedy, William Wordsworth, Ableism and Ability Studies, Homeric epic, and Genre studiesedit
- I am a scholar/critic, teacher, and writer, especially on disability, whose work has appeared in "The New York Times,... moreI am a scholar/critic, teacher, and writer, especially on disability, whose work has appeared in "The New York Times," "The Atlantic," and "Vox," among other publications. A graduate of Washington and Lee University (2016), I earned two master's degrees, in English (1550-1700) and Classics, from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar before coming to Princeton for my Ph.D. in English. My research interests include early modern English literature, Milton, disability studies, the Greco-Roman epic tradition, classical reception/Black classicism, and Tudor/Stuart drama (especially Roman plays and Shakespearean tragedy). Though I write about it less frequently, I'm likewise a fan of contemporary fiction, including Marilynne Robinson’s and Elizabeth Strout’s, as well as musical theater. My scholarship, and creative nonfiction, has either been published or is forthcoming in "Disability Studies Quarterly," "Reformation," the "Classical Receptions Journal," "SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900," and the "Huntington Library Quarterly," while many of my public-facing essays can be found in "Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal," for which I'm a contributing writer. I am a 2023-2024 Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellow, Princeton's top honor for graduate students. In the fall, I'll also be joining the faculty of Vassar College as an assistant professor of English.
I'm currently working on several book projects. My top priority---"Stand and Wait: Dynamics of Physical Dis/ability in the Greco-Roman Epic Tradition"---explores how nonnormative embodiment serves as both a problem to be solved and a spur to generic innovation in (neo)classical heroic verse. It begins by adducing several thematic and formal reasons for why epic poets often introduce disabled characters only to banish them soon afterwards. Four central chapters then discuss writers--Ovid, Spenser, Milton, and Phillis Wheatley Peters--whose relationship to the epic tradition has often been contested. I argue that their contributions come into clearer focus if we consider them as "crip renovations": narratives that incorporate, and even are shaped by, a broader range of somatic experiences than is typical for the genre, on the interrelated levels of form, temporality, and heroism. These poems thus become more accessible at least to certain kinds of othered bodyminds. My second book project---"All Pity Choked: The Falls of Tragedy and the Rise of Renaissance Cure"---reveals how early modern tragic literature becomes a site for litigating the ethics, efficacy, and affects of "cure," which gained conceptual currency in the Renaissance. Meanwhile, I'm also co-editing, with Angelica Duran, the first volume to bring Milton and disability studies into one another's orbits ("Milton and the Network of Disability, Embodiment, and Care Studies," under contract with Edinburgh UP) and writing essays of hybridized creative nonfiction and literary criticism, which I aim eventually to revise into a book.
Teaching is likewise important to me. I designed a course, “Literature and Psychology,” for Oxbridge Academic Programs in 2018, have served as an AI here at Princeton, co-taught introductory composition as part of the Prison Teaching Initiative, and in the fall of 2024, designed and taught a new course called "Bodies and Belonging in Milton's Epic Tradition" with Nigel Smith. In 2024, the Princeton Graduate School acknowledged my contributions with one of its annual Teaching Awards. Outside the classroom, I'm an advisor at one of Princeton's undergraduate colleges (Whitman) and a frequent mentor for fellowship applicants.edit
Scholars often struggle to account for the many corporeal impairments in Julius Caesar. This article considers them constitutive to the play’s tragic poetics. As the falls of its great men prove inextricable from the falls, or failures,... more
Scholars often struggle to account for the many corporeal impairments in Julius Caesar. This article considers them constitutive to the play’s tragic poetics. As the falls of its great men prove inextricable from the falls, or failures, of their imbricated bodies and minds, unpitied psychosomatic downturn both precipitates and becomes a microcosm of its tragic counterpart. Attending to this convergence with the help of disability theory shines new light on Julius Caesar’s circular unity, the conspirators’ plot, and the quarrel scene. More importantly, it also situates the tragedy as a primer to the mutable interplay between pity and disability that subtends Shakespeare’s mature tragic praxis.
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This study offers the first social network analysis of Elizabeth Barton (c.1506–34), the last medieval-style female visionary in England. Drawing from Thomas Cromwell’s investigation in the State Papers, the study creates a hand-curated... more
This study offers the first social network analysis of Elizabeth Barton (c.1506–34), the last medieval-style female visionary in England. Drawing from Thomas Cromwell’s investigation in the State Papers, the study creates a hand-curated data set that, when entered into network visualization tools, shows the most prominent members of the network. Findings indicate that Barton was not the pawn of her confessor Edward Bocking (d. 1534), a claim made by the Henrician government and some historians. Equally important is the result that middling churchmen, rather than elite Tudor figures, were most responsible for distributing Barton’s visions.
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At the start of Tommy Orange's There There, Cheyenne child Tony Loneman peers into his television screen and considers a playground taunt: "Why's your face look like that?" Confronted with his reflection, he discovers the "Drome"—the way... more
At the start of Tommy Orange's There There, Cheyenne child Tony Loneman peers into his television screen and considers a playground taunt: "Why's your face look like that?" Confronted with his reflection, he discovers the "Drome"—the way fetal alcohol syndrome has contoured his body, "the way history lands on a face." The novel ends with another question from Tony: "Grandma, what are we?" With these pillared concerns—the "why" of nonnormative embodiment and the "what" of cultural identity—There There invites us to consider the ways that Indigeneity and disability are constitutive of one another. We argue that Orange (Cheyenne and Arapaho) explores how the disabled Native bodymind is always under the surveillance of the present colonial eye. We do so via close-readings of three of Tony's encounters in the novel: with himself, with an able-bodied, non-Native interlocutor who interrogates his cultural and bodymind alterity, and with his grandmother. Embodying the ancestral trauma renewed in these moments, Tony must not only live within a multi-generational temporality but must also (re)assemble his reality through constant encounters with non-Native interlocuters, moments that mimic and remind the reader of the original contact zones of American coloniality. In analyzing these moments, this article considers how disability and Indigeneity are, at once, in tension while also mutually constitutive of one another through three ongoing operations of the colonial project: the branding, transformation, and invasive reading of the bodymind. As settler colonialism continues to find its "specific, irreducible element" of territoriality not only on the geographical space of the Americas, but also on the individual bodymind, disability and Indigeneity, the corporeal and the ideological, the national and the personal, become metonymically connected and intimately imbricated.
Although many scholars have discussed Phillis Wheatley’s subversive appropriation of the classics, they have been reluctant to locate a similar strain of subtle repudiation in her Revolutionary War poems. The present article reexamines... more
Although many scholars have discussed Phillis Wheatley’s subversive appropriation of the classics, they have been reluctant to locate a similar strain of subtle repudiation in her Revolutionary War poems. The present article reexamines these verses — ‘To His Excellency General Washington’ (1775), ‘On the Capture of General Lee’ (1776), and ‘On the Death of General Wooster’ (1778) — in light of the tradition of (neo)classical heroic poetry. I read them as a formally innovative epic, dispersed across three apparently ‘patriotic lyrics’ (Levernier (1993: 175)) and dubbed the ‘Little Columbiad’ for their personification of America. Wheatley signals that the triptych should be read as far more than a trio of occasional poems. She not only evokes elements of the epic tradition but also obfuscates the Lucanic heart of her piece within a Virgilian body. This deft juxtaposition of disparate epic registers and forms allows the poet to reprove revolutionary generals, comment upon the war, and ...
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Although scholars addressing William Wordsworth's shorter lyrics have traditionally praised his positive treatment of physical otherness, at least one commenter writing on The Prelude correctly characterizes Wordsworth's depiction of... more
Although scholars addressing William Wordsworth's shorter lyrics have traditionally praised his positive treatment of physical otherness, at least one commenter writing on The Prelude correctly characterizes Wordsworth's depiction of disabled individuals as "demonic" (Curran 184). This is a divide that as of yet has not been properly explicated, and one which I attribute to the shift in genre, from lyric to epic, which superimposes onto The Prelude pre-drawn battle-lines between the virile hero and the sluggishly-monstrous, aberrant creatures who stand in his way. Indeed, the poet's consistent stigmatization of disability coupled with an equally persistent insistence that physical ability is fundamental to his epic endeavor situates The Prelude more squarely within the epic tradition than previously noticed. As in the works of poetic forbears, disabled characters nearly derail Wordsworth from his epic project-the development of the poet's mind via the instruction of nature. But more importantly, it is Wordsworth's commentary on how one can most successfully participate in the natural world that definitively excludes physically-othered individuals from achieving even a romanticized iteration of heroic status. By the end of this essay, then, it will become clear that The Prelude, which many scholars consider to be extending Milton's epic turn inward in Paradise Lost, depends far more upon the physical realm, and ability, than previously believed.
Research Interests:
Although scholars addressing William Wordsworth's shorter lyrics have traditionally praised his positive treatment of physical otherness, at least one commenter writing on The Prelude correctly characterizes Wordsworth's depiction... more
Although scholars addressing William Wordsworth's shorter lyrics have traditionally praised his positive treatment of physical otherness, at least one commenter writing on The Prelude correctly characterizes Wordsworth's depiction of disabled individuals as "demonic" (Curran 184). This is a divide that as of yet has not been properly explicated, and one which I attribute to the shift in genre, from lyric to epic, which superimposes onto The Prelude pre-drawn battle-lines between the virile hero and the sluggishly-monstrous, aberrant creatures who stand in his way. Indeed, the poet's consistent stigmatization of disability coupled with an equally persistent insistence that physical ability is fundamental to his epic endeavor situates The Prelude more squarely within the epic tradition than previously noticed. As in the works of poetic forbears, disabled characters nearly derail Wordsworth from his epic project—the development of the poet's mind via the instruction of nature. But more importantly, it is Wordsworth's commentary on how one can most successfully participate in the natural world that definitively excludes physically-othered individuals from achieving even a romanticized iteration of heroic status. By the end of this essay, then, it will become clear that The Prelude, which many scholars consider to be extending Milton's epic turn inward in Paradise Lost, depends far more upon the physical realm, and ability, than previously believed.