Patrick McKelvey

Biography

Patrick McKelvey (PhD, Brown University) researches the theatrical, cultural, and social history of disability in the twentieth-century United States. His first book, Disability Works: Performance After Rehabilitation (New York University Press, 2024) examines the relationship between US disability policy and the disability arts and culture movement, 1960-1990.

Disability Works received the Working-Class Studies Association’s CLR James Book Award and has been named a finalist for the Association in Theatre in Higher Education’s Outstanding Book Award; the American Theatre and Drama Society’s John W. Frick Book Award; and the Association for American Publishers’ PROSE Award (Music and Performing Arts Category).

McKelvey received a National Humanities Center Fellowship to write his second book, Supporting Actors: Disability, Infrastructure, Performance. This book offers a history of social services for disabled theatre workers across the twentieth-century United States. His writing on service animals, sign language theatre, actor training, disabled performativity, prosthetics, and AIDS performance have appeared in Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, and Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings (Oxford University Press). With Samuel Yates (Penn State University), he is co-editor of “Disability Performance Histories,” a special section in the forthcoming (2026) volume of Theatre History Studies.

Prior to joining the faculty at Notre Dame, McKelvey taught at the University of Pittsburgh.