How the autism spectrum in the popular imagination overlaps with and feeds a particular feature of European-American whiteness: the bias toward independence and self-sufficiency.
Hannah Walser is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at Stanford. Her dissertation, titled "Mind-Reading in the Dark: Social Cognition in Nineteenth-Century American Literature," argues for the significance of non-intentionalistic representations of the mind in the selection and solidification of the American canon. Her research and teaching reflects a general interest in literary models of social cognition, from Proust to pragmatist philosophy to the contemporary neuronovel.