Eden Rea-Hedrick

Eden Rea-Hedrick is a PhD candidate in English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University, where they have also completed certificates in Film and Media Studies and College Teaching Preparation. Their research interests encompass disability, 20th-century British and American literature and culture, film and media, feminist and queer theory, the history of sexuality, and the medical humanities. Their dissertation, “Cripples of Sex: Disability at the Queer Midcentury,” recuperates disability discourses and aesthetics in queer midcentury culture, arguing that disability is fundamental rather than detrimental to midcentury queer self-fashioning. Eden earned a B.A. in English from Indiana University and studied English and Comparative Literature at St Anne’s College, Oxford. 

At Yale, Eden is a founding member and co-facilitator of the Disability Studies Community Working Group, an organizer for the annual Disability and Accessibility at Yale Symposium, and a member of the English department’s Graduate Student Advisory Committee. In the Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning, they serve as Graduate Assistant Director of the Yale College Writing Center and a McDougal Teaching Fellow. Their teaching spans courses in queer history, writing studies, disability theory, modernist literature, and beyond at Yale College, the Yale Prison Education Initiative, and Connecticut College. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals including Modernism/modernity, Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture, The Polyphony, and the Historical Journal of Film, Radio & Television.