Sarah L. Orsak is a feminist disability scholar. Her work is broadly concerned with the imbrications of disability, race, gender, and nation in the United States, specifically focalizing the relationship between disability and Blackness through literary and cultural analysis. Trained in Gender Studies, Orsak connects Black feminist thought and critical disability studies.

As a Rising Scholar Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Orsak is currently at work on her first book manuscript, Extractive Inclusion: Blackness and the Rehabilitation of White Disability. The project examines how Blackness structures the contours of disability and able-bodiedness in the US and how institutions mobilize this relationship for oppressive ends.

Orsak’s work has been funded by the Mellon Foundation and the Rutgers Center for Research on Women and has been supported by the American Studies Association’s Critical Disability Studies Caucus and the Insurgent Intersections: Combating Global Anti-Blackness Project. She holds a PhD in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Rutgers University—New Brunswick.