Dr. Emily Baldys

Dr. Emily Baldys is a teacher and scholar with specialties in nineteenth-century British literature and disability studies. Her research explores the ways in which literary texts engage with scientific, medical, and popular discourse to shape cultural conceptions of the abnormal body and mind. Her current book project examines depictions of disability and rehabilitation in the fiction of Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, and Elizabeth Gaskell. Previous publications have also explored the intersection of disability with constructions of gender, class, and domesticity in classic and contemporary literature. Prior to teaching at Millersville University, she worked at Zane State College, where she taught modern British literature, composition, the literature of sustainability, and the literature of crime. Her Ph.D. in English is from Penn State University, where she also earned the Raymond Lombra Graduate Award for Excellence in Research in the Humanities. 

Degrees: 

Ph.D., English, The Pennsylvania State University 

M.A., English, The Pennsylvania State University 

B.A., English, Bryn Mawr College  

Specializations: 

Victorian Literature, Disability Studies, Romantic Literature 

Interests: 

Women’s writing, disability justice, early feminism, popular romance, the history of psychiatry

Courses Taught:

• ENGL 110 English Composition
• ENGL 233 Early British Literature: Dragons, Knights, and Faerie Queens
• ENGL 234 Later British Literature: Empire and Aftermath
• ENGL 237 Literary Research and Analysis
• ENGL 242 Reading Our World: The Literature of Disability
• ENGL 405 Shakespeare
• ENGL 412 Victorian Literature: Madwomen and Decadent Men
• ENGL 414 The British Novel
• ENGL 416 The Woman Writer and Her World
• ENGL 612 Literature of Victorian England
• ENGL 615 Seminar in Selected British Writers

Passions & Distractions: 

Animals of all kinds, especially cats; travel; cooking and eating; gardening; fantasy role-playing games; minor league baseball 

Sample Publications: 

"Disabling the Madman: Dickens and the Moral Management of Barnaby Rudge and David Copperfield." Dickens Studies Annual 51.1 (2020): 41–72.

“Hareton Earnshaw and the Shadow of Idiocy: Disability and Domestic Disorder in Wuthering Heights.” Philological Quarterly 91.1 (2012): 49–74. 

“Disabled Sexuality, Incorporated: The Compulsions of Popular Romance.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 6.2 (2012): 125–41.