For a historian, finding 20 boxes of archived source material is a pretty big deal. And when Patrick McKelvey found more than 150 boxes of papers stemming from just one man, he knew he’d struck gold.
He was researching the history of disability and the arts at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library when he discovered Ron Whyte. Whyte was a disabled playwright and activist who McKelvey describes as “incredibly weird, prolific, and imaginative.” He ghostwrote Marvel comics, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and founded an activist organization.
But McKelvey, who studies the social, cultural, and theatrical history of disability in the U.S., had never heard of him. And after reading Whyte’s story and realizing his place in the history of disability and the arts, McKelvey made the playwright a focal point of his first book, Disability Works: Performance After Rehabilitation.
“The book invites us to think about a deeper history of disability arts and culture movements,” McKelvey said.
Disability Works details the history of disability and performance in the United States between World War II and the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. Published last year, it covers an understudied yet foundational aspect of the Disability Rights Movement, and it has earned McKelvey considerable recognition for his research.
Disability Works has won five 2025 book awards, including the Lilla A. Heston Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Interpretation & Performance Studies from the National Communication Association and the C.L.R. James Award from the Working-Class Studies Association. It also received a special mention for the Theatre and Performance Research Association David Bradby Monograph Prize and was a finalist for four additional awards.
“The fact that my book could land with scholars in such a diverse array of disciplines was really meaningful,” said McKelvey, an associate professor of theatre in Notre Dame’s Department of Film, Television, and Theatre. “I’m really grateful for the recognition.”
‘A deeper history’
Disability performance as a research field has grown immensely in the 21st century, McKelvey said, but most of the work is focused on contemporary artists and initiatives. In his research, McKelvey has observed an assumption that a disability arts and culture movement emerged alongside civil rights activism in the 1970s, creating an environment in which disabled artists could make self-consciously political work.
“All that’s true, but there’s less recognition of the idea that there is a politically invested, socially conscious disability arts and culture movement that precedes disability rights movements,” McKelvey said.
Disability Works fills this gap, looking at the decades before the civil rights movements of the ’70s.
In that period, the U.S. government focused disability policy on vocational rehabilitation. This paradigm suggests that what makes a person disabled is less their physical, mental, or intellectual difference in itself, but rather how their difference impedes their ability to labor, McKelvey said.
To help people with disabilities enter the workforce, the U.S. Office of Vocational Rehabilitation created programs to provide them with job training, career counseling, and educational support. And that included investments in the arts — a place where they could find employment.
It’s difficult for most artists to earn a steady income, and disabled artists have the additional struggle of needing robust health insurance. The Comprehensive Employment and Training Act ultimately became a lifeline for disabled artists, McKelvey said, providing them with full-time, salaried employment for creating and teaching art in their local communities.
Whyte was employed by CETA for two years and was placed at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City as its playwright-in-residence.
“As that job title would suggest, he was supposed to write plays,” McKelvey said. “But he didn’t really write anything while he was employed.”
Instead, Whyte took advantage of the economic security — the first time in his life he had it — to fight for the rights of disabled artists through his own activist organization, the National Task Force for Disability and the Arts.
Discovering Whyte’s archival records forced McKelvey to reconceptualize his project. It became the story of government initiatives that preceded Whyte and how Whyte turned basic support into institutional contributions that still affect disability arts today.
“Disability Works is interested in the way disabled artists experienced government initiatives and resources in ways that are more invested in collective justice for disabled people,” McKelvey said. “Not just whether any individual disabled person gets a paycheck.”
Activism and performance intertwined
The arts and disability studies might initially seem a peculiar combination, but their histories are intertwined, McKelvey said.
During the disability rights movement, arts venues became spaces to test issues of equal access, such as how people with physical disabilities can enter buildings or how blind people can enjoy visual performances.
“Theatres become stand-ins for the ways in which disabled people are excluded from public life,” McKelvey said. “And a lot of disability activism in the 20th century took the form of performance, too.”
“This historical work is a gift I can provide that conversation."
McKelvey continues to work on this intersection in his next book, "Supporting Actors: AIDS, Infrastructure, Performance,” which he is drafting with support from the National Humanities Center as one of its 32 fellows for the 2025-26 academic year.
The book will share the story of the American theatre industry’s response to the AIDS epidemic, specifically how the Actors’ Fund — now called the Entertainment Community Fund — began to function as an AIDS service organization.
While these stories are personally interesting to McKelvey, a large part of why he researches disability arts history is because not many can. Though the field is growing, many disability arts scholars are artists themselves and focus on creating and theorizing their own work. Many are also disabled and therefore face barriers to completing archival research.
As someone with the physical ability and the institutional support to write history, McKelvey sees his work as an opportunity to ask new questions and tell hidden stories.
“This historical work is a gift I can provide that conversation,” he said.
Originally published by at al.nd.edu on December 15, 2025.