Short Bio:

Zoë H Wool is assistant professor in the department of anthropology at the University of Toronto, Mississauga, where she teaches courses on topics ranging from the anthropology of toxicity to gender and disability. Professor Wool’s work spans anthropology, disability studies, queer theory, and feminist science and technology studies, with a focus on the materialities of post-9/11 warmaking and military harm and the tyrannies of normativity in the contemporary United States. Professor Wool has published numerous peer reviewed articles and book chapters, and is also a contributor to many spaces of online scholarship. Her first book After War: The weight of life at Walter Reed (Duke UP, 2015) was awarded honorable mention for the 2016 Gregory Bateson Book Prize, awarded by the Society for Cultural Anthropology, and in 2018 Professor Wool was awarded a prestigious CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation. Professor Wool is co-founder of Project Pleasantville, a team project documenting Black civic engagement and toxic exposure in Houston's historic Pleasantville neighborhoods and in 2021 will launch the Toxicity, Waste, and Infrastructure Group (TWIG) Research Kitchen at UTM, a convivial and experimental feminist research space.

Long Bio:

Zoë H Wool is assistant professor in the department of anthropology at the University of Toronto, Mississauga, where she teaches courses ranging from the anthropology of toxicity to gender and disability. Professor Wool’s work spans sociocultural and medical anthropology, disability studies, queer theory, and feminist science and technology studies (STS). Her work aims to help reframe our understanding of what post-9/11 warmaking entails and how its harms manifest in the contemporary US--from the collateral effects of military medicine's salvific promise to the routine production of environmental illness. Professor Wool's work also explores how the overt violence of war making is tangled up with other structures of harm, particularly ableism, heteropatriarchy, and environmental racism.  As an anthropologist, Professor Wool focuses on the way these structures materialize in the textures of everyday life, including in bodies and the intimate relations between them. Her first book, After War: The Weight of Life at Walter Reed (Duke UP, 2015), is an ethnography of grievously injured US soldiers and their family members at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. It has been widely reviewed and taught and received honorable mention for the 2016 Gregory Bateson Book Prize from the Society for Cultural Anthropology.

Professor Wool is currently working on three new book projects. The first, The Significance of Others, is a collection of ethnographic essays about experiments and inequities in disability worldmaking and brings together veteran and queer disability communities. The second, whose working title is War and the Logics of Combustion, is a collaboration with Kenneth MacLeish (Vanderbilt University) and focuses on the US military's use of toxic burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan. The third, Homunculus Revolts, is a biography of the cortical homunculus that speaks to the entanglement of race and disability in neurological instantiations of the brain/body dualism.

In addition to these book projects, Professor Wool is the co-founder of Project Pleasantville, a team project documenting the history and present life of Black civic engagement and toxic exposure in Houston's historic Pleasantville neighborhood. She also has a stream of work at the interface of STS and Disability Studies, which has included a collaborative research project with wearable robotics engineers, and efforts to support the growing field of Crip Technoscience. She is currently developing a multimedia ethnographic research kitchen at the University of Toronto, Mississauga that will explore urban and industrial infrastructures and toxicity in the GTA.  

Before coming to the University of Toronto, Professor Wool spent five years as assistant professor in the department of anthropology at Rice University, where she was also core faculty member at the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and in the Program in Medical Humanities. Prior to that, Professor Wool held postdoctoral positions in the department of anthropology at Columbia University and at Rutgers University's Center for Research on Health, Health Care and Ageing Policy. Her work has been widely published, including in Cultural Anthropology, Social Text, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Ethnos, Critical Military Studies, and Focal. Professor Wool also writes in a variety of spaces of online scholarship, including anthro{dendum}.org (nee SavageMinds.org), Somatosphere.net, Public Books, and Twitter (yes, Twitter). Professor Wool's work has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the NIH postdoctoral program, and the Mellon-funded Public Humanities initiative at Rice University, among other entities. In 2018, Professor Wool received a prestigious NSF CAREER Award.