Center and Institutes Fellow

PhD Candidate in Communication Arts and Sciences

(Fall 2025)

For over a century, hundreds of thousands of people with mental disabilities lived, and often died in mental institutions. There is very little space in American history or memory dedicated to institutionalization and any given institution is more likely to be encountered through the context of ghosts than as a museum or traditional memory site. When these institutions are remembered at all, they are remembered as haunted. My dissertation aims to trace this pattern through several sites and artifacts to figure out why institutions are always remembered as haunted.

My dissertation proposes that ghosts are powerful yet often overlooked rhetorical memory devices. I follow ghosts through four former institutions and explore how they communicate and complicate memories of institutionalization. Ultimately, I plan to argue that due to the absence of museums and other traditional memory sites it is ghosts that make memories of institutionalization matter. If they were not remembered as haunted, institutions, and those who lived and died there, would not be remembered at all.