about.
Meghann O’Leary (she/her) is a mad interdisciplinary educator, scholar, and activist whose work focuses on the nuanced, collective, and individual experiences of madness (otherwise termed mental illness, psychiatric disability etc.) both in life and representation. Her passion for challenging the systemic structures that hold mad people captive and limit their agency is reflected in her pedagogy, scholarship, activism, artistic hobbies, and pursuits, as well as her various media consumptions. Her work engages and challenges others to view the world from a non-normative mad lens, celebrating the humanity and perspectives of the mad community.
Meghann is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Disability Studies at the Department of Educational Psychology at Miami University of Ohio. She holds a Ph.D. in Disability Studies from the University of Illinois in Chicago. She holds a Master’s Degree in Special Education from the University of New Mexico and a Bachelor’s Degree in English Literature from Vassar College. Her research interests include the intersections of Critical Mad Studies and Critical Disability Studies as well as providing an intersectional lens to the study of life writings by women diagnosed with psychiatric disabilities.
Her current work analyzes life-writing by madwomen through a crip mad theoretical framework and methodology she refers to as maddening, which locates holding spaces to experience the disorientation and messiness of madness and disability, free from the clinical protocols of recovery and wellness, appropriated by the psy industrial complex. Her readings of madwomen's self-representation are informed by historical, cultural, and political contexts to frame the relationship between disability, madness, gender, class, and race.