Pasquale Toscano

Pasquale Toscano is scholar/critic, teacher, and writer, especially on disability, whose public-facing work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Electric Literature, and Vox, among other publications. A graduate of Washington and Lee University (2016), he earned two master’s degrees, in English (1550-1700) and Classics, from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, before completing his Ph.D. in English at Princeton University. His 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 he writes about it less frequently, he’s likewise a fan of contemporary fiction, including Marilynne Robinson’s and Elizabeth Strout’s, as well as musical theater. His 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, The Oxford Handbook of George Herbert, and Shakespeare’s Madnesses, while many of his public-facing essays can be found in Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal, for which he’s a contributing writer. He was a 2023-2024 Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellow, Princeton’s highest honor for graduate students.

Pasquale is currently working on several book projects. His 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 afterward. Four central chapters then discuss writers—Ovid, Spenser, Milton, and Phillis Wheatley Peters—whose relationship to the epic tradition has often been contested. Pasquale argues 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. Stand and Wait exposes the limits and allure of heroism; rescripts the rise, fall, and surprising staying power of epic; and shows what this ancient genre has to teach us about accessibility and accommodation today. Pasquale’s 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, affects, and efficacy of “cure,” which gained conceptual currency in the Renaissance. Meanwhile, he’s co-editing the first volume to bring Milton and disability studies into one another’s orbits (Milton and the Network of Disability, Embodiment, and Care, under contract with Edinburgh UP) and writing essays of hybridized creative nonfiction and literary criticism (most recently, for Electric Literature), which he aims to revise into a book.

Teaching is likewise important to Pasquale. He designed a course, “Literature and Psychology,” for Oxbridge Academic Programs in 2018, served as an assistant-in-instruction at Princeton, co-taught introductory composition as part of the Prison Teaching Initiative, and in the fall of 2023, 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 his contributions with one of its annual Teaching Awards. At Vassar, his courses include “Succession, From Tudor England to HBO,” “Shakespeare, Our Collaborator,” “Devious Bodies and Dangerous Minds: Health, Medicine, and Disability in Early Modern English Literature,” and “Taking Books Personally.” Outside the classroom, he serves as a frequent mentor for fellowship applicants. Pasquale’s teaching and advising strives to center accessibility in every sense of the word.