Author: Pasquale Toscano

Pasquale Toscano is a scholar/critic, teacher, and writer, whose work has appeared in "The New York Times," "Vox," "The Atlantic," "Disability Studies Quarterly," and the "Classical Receptions Journal," among other publications. An assistant professor of English at Vassar College, he focuses on Renaissance literature, Milton, classical reception/Black classicism, and disability studies. His current book project--tentatively entitled "'Stand and Wait': Dynamics of Physical Dis/ability in the Epic Tradition"--explores the foundational importance of physical incapacity to a genre where we'd hardly expect it to have any purchase at all: epic. His recognitions include a Rhodes Scholarship, the Harold Grimm Prize from the Sixteenth-Century Society (for scholarship on the Reformation), and a 2024 Jacobus Fellowship, Princeton's top honor for graduate students.

A Homage to Crip Creativity: “Hacks” and the Human Condition

On May 28, 2026, the acclaimed comedy series Hacks (HBO) premiered its final episode. In it, the show’s two leading ladies—veteran comic Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) and her younger, more progressive, writer Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder)—take a final trip to Paris, together. I say final because—beware spoilers—Deborah has just been diagnosed with cancer, has decided…

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Close Encounters of the Realist Kind: Toward Disability Poetics

What are disability poetics? What does it mean to invoke such a thing? Why should we? These are questions I’ve been asking myself and my students for most of the year, especially in several reviews I’ve written of works by disabled artists. I always seem to circle around an answer without ever reaching one that…

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The Crip Poetics of Paradoxical Concession

For the brilliant students of ENG 341 To date online as a disabled gay man means disclosing your limp to someone who likely has more than a soupçon of concern for fitness. At least, it means doing so eventually. One’s profile could cop to using a cane and brace, of course, but mine doesn’t, for…

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Unfitness, Utopianism, and the Ugly Backwardness of Progressive Beauty

For the members of my inaugural class: the brilliant first-years of “Succession” When the film Black Panther, directed by Ryan Coogler, was released to that rare mix of critical and popular esteem in 2018, I knew I was supposed to like it—not just as a progressive but as a critic myself. Indeed, I did: it’s…

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The Head of a Dog or Horn of a Rhino: Meaning, Milton, and Me

THE HEAD OF A DOG OR HORN OF A RHINO: MEANING, MILTON, & ME [H]e reproaches me with want of beauty and loss of sight: “A monster huge and hideous, void of sight.” … [B]ut he immediately corrects himself, and says, “though not indeed huge, for there cannot be a more spare, shrivelled and bloodless…

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“There Goes the Monster”: gazing at blind men in Restoration tragedy, part II

In my last article for Synapsis on Milton’s Samson Agonistes (1671), I mentioned that much of the tragedy is concerned with the fact that its blind hero is “[m]ade of his enemies the scorn and gaze” (34).[1] It’s worth highlighting this thematic epicenter not only because scholars more often emphasize Restoration political debates than disability…

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