Dr. Vivian Delchamps Wolf
Assistant Professor of English,
Dominican University of California
Vivian Delchamps Wolf (PhD, UCLA English, 2022) is an Assistant Professor of English (Rhetoric and Composition) at Dominican University of California (DUC). Her research and teaching focus upon 19th-century American literature, feminist disability studies, writing pedagogy, race studies, and the health humanities.
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Her monograph, Resisting Diagnosis: Women's Disability Literature of the Nineteenth-Century United States, is under advance contract with the University of Michigan Press. This book argues that women writers of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras used literature to direct diagnostic scrutiny away from individual bodyminds and towards oppressive institutions.
A dancer as well as disability justice advocate, Wolf recently served the Disability Law Journal at UCLA; REPAIR: A Health and Disability Justice Organization; and the Center for Accessible Education. She founded the Disability Studies Reading Group at DUC and has been awarded the Melba Beals Award twice.
Select Teaching Experience
Dominican University of California (Current)
2024–2025 Nominee for Teacher of the Year
I teach courses in English, writing, and health humanities, with a focus on disability studies. My classes are offered across in-person, hybrid, asynchronous, and service-learning formats.
Selected Courses
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Feminist Disability Ethics in Literature (in person)
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American Transcendentalism (hybrid)
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Writing in the Age of AI: Ethics & Human Connection (asynchronous; service learning)
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Education & Belonging (hybrid/asynchronous; service learning)
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Disability and Care Work (hybrid)
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Children’s Literature (in person)
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Literary Monsters (hybrid)
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Class, Poverty, & Wealth (hybrid; service learning)
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Food, Community, and Culture (hybrid)
Performing Arts & Social Change
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Theater for Social Change (in person; service learning)
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Shakespeare for Social Change (in person; service learning)
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Dance as Therapy (independent study/internship; hybrid)
Health Humanities
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Health Humanities Seminar (in person)
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Medical Humanities Seminar (UTHealth Houston)
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Guest lecturer, Health Humanities courses, Rice University
Research Interests and Publications
U.S. Literature (1840-1900); Feminist Disability Studies; Race Studies; Poetry; Writing Pedagogy; Gender & Sexuality Studies; Critical Animal Studies; Performance; Medical and Health Humanities ​
Note: Should your institution not provide you with access to any of these articles, please feel free to request them from me via email.
BOOKS
Forthcoming Resisting Diagnosis: Women’s Disability Literature of the Nineteenth-Century U.S. (under advance contract with University of Michigan Press, Corporealities series; full manuscript submission Dec. 2026).
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PEER-REVIEWED JOURNAL ARTICLES
2026 Wolf. “Haunting J. Marion Sims: Disability and Race in Bettina Judd’s Patient.” Literature and Medicine(forthcoming spring 2026).
2025 Wolf. “To Calmly Rest: Frances E.W. Harper’s Sensational Black Disability Poetics.” J19: The Journal of 19th-Century Americanists, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 349-367. DOI: 10.1353/jnc.2025.a985039.
2021 Delchamps. “Rattlesnake Kinship: Indigeneity, Disability, Animality.” Disability Studies Quarterly, vol. 41, no. 4. DSQ. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v41i4.8451.
2019 Delchamps. “‘The Names of Sickness’: Emily Dickinson, Diagnostic Reading, and Articulating Disability.” The Emily Dickinson Journal, vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 106-132. DOI: 10.1353/edj.2019.0006.
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BOOK CHAPTERS
2025 Wolf. “Accessible Language in the Writing Classroom.” In Anti-Ableist Composition: Writing Studies and Accessibility in Unprecedented Times. Edited by Psyche Ready and Ada Hubrig, WAC Clearinghouse (forthcoming winter 2025).
2025 Wolf. “Disability and Collective Care in Charlotte Forten’s Civil War Writings.” In Care and Disability: Relational Representations. Edited by Talia C. Schaffer and Chris Gabbard. Routledge, pp. 191-206.
2020 Delchamps. “‘A Slight Hysterical Tendency’: Performing Diagnosis in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’” In Performing Hysteria: Images and Imaginations of Hysteria. Edited by Johanna Braun. Leuven UP, pp. 105-122.
2018 Delchamps. “Teaching Poetry Through Dance.” In Poetry and Pedagogy Across the Lifespan: Disciplines, Classrooms, Contexts. Edited by Sandra Lee Kleppe and Angela Sorby. Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 37-55.
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REFERENCE WORKS
2025 Wolf. “Disability and Animality.” In Oxford Bibliographies of Disability Studies. Edited by Dr. Jenifer Barclay. Oxford UP (forthcoming fall 2025).
2023 Delchamps. “Invisible Illness Narratives in the United States.” In The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Health Humanities. Edited by Paul Crawford and Paul Kadetz. Palgrave Macmillan.
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PUBLIC SCHOLARSHIP
2025 Wolf. "Preface." Tuxedo: Literature and Arts Journal, edited by Ma'ayan Simon. https://tuxedojournal.wordpress.com/zines/
2023 Delchamps. “Joints and Dashes and Rond de Jambes.” Tuxedo. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pa2i6wCM_aEpJfYQbKlu7xi4-EGK0wdI/view?usp=sharing.
2023 Delchamps. “Early American Disability Studies: Teaching (and Confronting) Internalized Ableism.” Insurrect! Radical Thinking in Early American Studies. https://www.insurrecthistory.com/archives/ngm4uofsyd0cwys3a7nvvj7169nvsv.
Service to the Profession
I engage in institutional service that supports a diverse student body and fosters inclusive, cross-disciplinary collaboration. At Dominican, I serve on assessment and curriculum committees, mentor students from historically underrepresented groups, and direct the Performing Arts and Social Change minor. Finally, I founded a Disability Studies Reading Group and subsequently was awarded the Melba Beals Award for Diversity two successive years.
Thanks to my commitment to thinking through issues LLMs may pose to higher education and social justice work, I was recently invited to lead AI Ethics workshops, one for faculty and another for undergraduates.
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At the national level, I contribute service to the profession by reviewing books and manuscripts, presiding over and organizing conference panels, and by serving as a member of MLA Medical Humanities and Health Studies Executive Committee as well as the Health Humanities Consortium’s Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion committee.
In the role of disability advisor, I have served 5+ organizations by assessing program accessibility and organizing trainings. I'm passionate about creatively choreographing anti-ableist and anti-saneist practices in the academy and beyond.
2026
Guest leader, Dungeon Master for Dungeons and Dragons game, San Francisco Disability Cultural Center
2024-2027
Advisory Board Member, Research Study: “Enhancing Arts and Recreation Participation among People with Neurodevelopmental Disabilities through Occupational Therapy Consultation.”
2022-2024
Member, Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Committee, The Health Humanities Consortium
2022
Community Partner Liaison, Social Media Access for All (SoMAA) Disability Studies Inclusion Lab, UCLA
2021-2022
Volunteer Organizer, REPAIR: A Disability Justice and Health Organization
2019-2022
Member, Ad Hoc Committee on Disability and Accessibility, C19: The Society of 19th-Century Americanists
2021-2022
Member, Committee for Disability Studies Seminars, Massachusetts Historical Society
2021-2022
Advisory Board Member, CAE: The Center for Accessible Education
2018-2022
Disability Studies Advisor, The Disability Law Journal at UCLA
Performing Arts
I direct the Performing Arts and Social Change minor program at DUC. We're always looking for potential Marin County collaborators. Please reach out with any questions.
A lifelong dancer, I also founded and taught for the Dancesport Club at UCLA for 6 years and taught for the Berkeley City Ballet in 2014-15.
Poetry
My poems explore disability and chronic illness as generative playgrounds for knowledge as well as sites of pain and vulnerability. Taking inspiration from Emily Dickinson, Ada Limón, H.D., and Mary Oliver (to name a few), I alternate between calling upon a dis/embodied narrator and experimenting with sensory imagery to evoke laughter, hunger, and bewilderment. My chapbook-in-progress, THE BODY IS SWELL, is my attempt at colliding embodymindedness and language.
2025 Wolf. “Falling in Love with a One-Hundred-Year-Old Sea Witch.”
The engine(idling, issue no. 7, Fall 2025.
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2025 Wolf. “seeds.” Atlanta Review, spring/summer issue.
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Delchamps. Broken Antler (2024):
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Reformatting the Pain Scale: A Print Anthology (2023):
“Disabled Joy.”
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Magnets and Ladders (2023):
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Last Stanza Poetry Journal (2022):
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Shotglass Poetry Journal (2022):
“perpetual adolescence”
“Written Just Before”