Rebekka Michaelsen

Biography

Rebekka Michaelsen is a PhD candidate who studies the history of medical incarceration for mental disability in the United States in the early twentieth century. Her dissertation project compares the lived experiences of Black and Indigenous girls and young women confined in the only two federal institutions for the insane in the United States: Saint Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. (1855-1987) and the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians in Canton, South Dakota (1902-1933). She is interested in engaging intersections of race, gender, age, and disability in an effort to complicate conceptions of disability, Blackness, and resistance in slavery and its afterlives. She has a concentration certificate in Gender Studies.

Advanced to Candidacy

Current/Former HGSA Member