Diana Martha Louis is an Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan. She earned a B.A in English and Africana Studies, with a minor in Education from Cornell University. She received a Ph.D. in English from Emory University. From 2014 to 2016, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society (CRRES) and Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University.
Her research considers issues of mental health in African American life. Her recent book is entitled Colored Insane: Slavery, Asylums and Mental Illness in the Nineteenth Century.Colored Insane tells the story of how nineteenth-century psychiatric discourses made African Americans mad by both constructing disorders according to prevailing notions of race and insanity, and inflicting real psychological harm within asylums, plantations, jails, and society writ large. Further, it shows how Black people challenged harmful psychiatric beliefs and developed their own conceptualizations of mental health and wellness. Colored Insane reveals that multilayered, ubiquitous and ongoing experiences of mental disability in the 19th-century which set the stage for African Americans experiences for generations to come.
