Patrick McKelvey (NHC Fellow, 2025–26)
Project Title
Supporting Actors: A Disability History of Theatrical Welfare
Archie K. Davis Fellowship, 2025–26
Associate Professor of Film, Television, and Theatre, University of Notre Dame
Email
Patrick McKelvey (PhD, Brown University) is an associate professor of film, television, and theatre at the University of Notre Dame. He researches the cultural, social, and theatrical history of disability in the twentieth-century United States. His first book, Disability Works: Performance After Rehabilitation (New York University Press, 2024) received the Working-Class Studies Association’s CLR James Award and was a finalist for the Association of American Publishers’ PROSE Award (Music and the Performing Arts Category). His other writings appear in Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, and Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. With the support of a 2025–26 National Humanities Center fellowship, McKelvey is writing a second book, Supporting Actors: A Disability History of Theatrical Welfare.
Selected Publications
- McKelvey, Patrick. “‘Honest Work Done By Honest Dogs’: Canine Unemployment, Interspecies Rehabilitation, and Disability Performance.” Theatre Journal 77, no. 2 (2025): 147–71.
- McKelvey, Patrick. Disability Works: Performance After Rehabilitation. New York: New York University Press, 2024.
- McKelvey, Patrick.“The Race for Rehabilitation: Sign-Mime, The National Theatre of the Deaf, and Cold War Internationalism.” Theatre Survey 64, no. 1 (2023): 49–70.