A Stutterer Who Became A Professor: Stuttering on the Job Market

From ten-minute phone interrogations to longer Skype interviews to interviews at major conferences to campus visits full of meetings and presentations, academic job searches are designed to scrutinize how candidates communicate verbally in the most intense settings possible as a measure of their intellectual prowess and sociability. Consequently, those with disabilities that cause speech disfluencies…

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A Stutterer Who Became a Professor: Stuttering through Grad School

Years before becoming a professor, I started graduate school to pursue a PhD in history without thinking too much about the implications of my disability on my chance of building a career in the profession that would require me to speak publicly every day. Perhaps I had been too excited and optimistic about the prospect…

A Stutterer Who Became a Professor

Can Scholars with Speech Disorders Survive and Thrive in Academia? Many years ago I studied humanities and social sciences as a young undergraduate student at a large public university where lectures, big and small, were the most common pedagogical methods in the classes I took. I loved the eloquent and passionate lectures delivered by my…

Getting to Know Me: I’ve Become Friends with My Stuttering Self

I am one of about 3 million people in the United States who stutter. We represent 1% of the country’s population. Most of us started stuttering when we were young children. As far as I remember, I’ve always spoken with a stutter. It’s the only way I’ve spoken pretty much all my life. Despite common myths about stuttering,…

The Stuttering Professor’s Blog

Since I joined academia many years ago, I've wanted to jot down my reflections on how my speech disorder has impacted and continues to shape my life as a scholar who actively engages in interdisciplinary dialogues on social justice and accessibility. I also want to share how my struggle to find my own voice as…