My junior year of college was one of distraction and diffidence, change in a changed and changing body. It was also one of applying to the Beinecke Scholarship, and discovering the person I largely am now as a result: a scholar, writer, and someone who can talk of being disabled with pride.
The antecedent trouble began on July 5, 2013, when my father and I left for a mid-morning bicycle ride. We weren’t two minutes away from home, in suburban southwestern Ohio, when a pick-up truck hurtled me to the ground, burst one of my vertebrae, and paralyzed my body below the waist. I spent the next six months relearning to walk—and do everything else you expect to master only once in life. Unsurprisingly, I took a semester off from college, in the fall, and a reduced course load, in the spring.
This brings us back to junior year, which was a time of scaling up my academic operations, as my thoughts turned, evermore anxiously, to life beyond Washington and Lee University (where I went for undergrad). Sure, I was vertical again—with the cane and brace I use now—but existential concerns were baying with increasing persistence, concerns about being disabled at so young an age, which nonetheless felt so old: about what disability meant not only for my identity but for my career (though, to my mind, the two had always been imbricated).
Since middle school, I’d aspired to sit, one day, on the federal bench. (I was—and still am—the kind of tightly wound person whose dreams don’t stop simply at the first or tenth milestone but prognosticate all the way to the end.) And I’d constructed a trajectory by which I might end up in a robe. But thanks to several factors—my professors, courses, and accident—I was hearing and heeding the siren call of literary study, mostly of English and ancient Greco-Roman texts. It helped that Milton (who writes about his own experiences of disability and blindness); Ovid (the poet of unexpected somatic change par excellence); and many others—from Shakespeare, in Richard III, to Marilynne Robinson, in Home—were striking both intellectual and visceral chords. It turned out I wanted to spend more time with all of them, writing about their work and teaching these texts to others, in turn: students I could support, as my professors were supporting me. Along the way, I’d expose the long, premodern backstories of ableism and disability gain in my scholarship—for myself as much as for anyone else.
No sooner did I float the idea, however, then the admonitions came: dread and doom about academia, the job market, the humanities. My advisors and I finally settled on a path forward. If we could just get a bit of momentum going—just convince some organization to support my bid to be an academic—then maybe I’d have an in. It was time to apply to the Beinecke Scholarship.
Even if it hadn’t worked out, I’d be thankful for the process of collecting my materials together. They forced me to articulate my reasons for pursuing a Ph.D. in English in the first place—my research aims and pedagogical goals—offering me, in short, the perfect laboratory for wrestling with those existential questions that junior year brought terrifically into relief. As I began to consider the import of my disability, its intellectual and aspirational implications, I realized that my limp was no mere “handicap,” as people had taken to calling it, but rather a source of knowledge and, yes, even pride.
But, of course, the application also reaped more material rewards. That I was the beneficiary of the Sperry Foundation’s trust and largesse, in fact, achieved a remarkably double-effect, from both within and without. Not only did I feel, suddenly, that fighting against the odds might actually be worth it, that there would be reason to chase this pipe dream after all, but—reassured by this initial certification of promise—other organizations were willing to broaden the range of academic possibility that the Beinecke had first opened up: programs like the Marshall and Rhodes, which ended up bringing me to Oxford for two one-year master’s programs (in English and Classics). A Ph.D. (in English) at Princeton followed, and then the tenure track at Vassar.
These days, I still write on ancient epic and Renaissance literature. A volume I co-edited, Milton and the Network of Disability, Embodiment and Care—the first book to juxtapose those topics, wouldn’t you know—was released at the end of 2025. And my first monograph project—which rescripts the rise and fall of the epic genre, with chapters on Ovid and Milton alike—is being sent to the press, and then reviewers, by the end of the year. Whether I lived up to the promise the Beinecke reviewers originally identified remains an open question, but I’m trying to make good on the credit they extended my way.
We needn’t mince words: every day I walk to my office at Vassar, teach a text I love, close read a passage with a student in office hours—every time I manage to write something that reckons with disability, representation, aesthetics, and ableist thought, whether for a scholarly or public venue, and every time I receive an appreciative note from someone, another disabled person perhaps, in response—I silently offer up a votive of appreciation for what made this possible. Now I can do so more explicitly still: that is, offer my thanks to the Beinecke Scholarship.
Pasquale Toscano is an assistant professor of English at Vassar College, after studying classics in Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He’s written about disability and embodiment for publications such as The Hopkins Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Vox while his scholarship—on epic and Renaissance literature—has appeared in various academic journals and essay collections. With Angelica Duran, he is the co-editor of Milton and the Network of Disability, Embodiment and Care (Edinburgh UP, 2026). His current monograph project is entitled Stand and Wait: Dynamics of Disability in an Epic Tradition.