Todd Carmody is an ACLS New Faculty Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor in Berkeley’s English department, where he teaches broadly in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American and African American literatures. He is currently writing a book on disability and the social geography of race in the postbellum United States. Slow Moves the Pageant argues that the emergence of “disability” as a coherent social category in the latter half of the nineteenth century established a new vocabulary for describing “race” with reference to norms of speed, ranges of motion, and forms of access. Working across a richly interdisciplinary archive, this project explores how material histories of disability shaped the changing meaning of freedom in the years and decades after slavery.