Assistant Professor of Higher Education

The Scholar

Dr. Kat Stephens-Peace is a Caribbean-born, disability-identified scholar whose intellectual project bridges the personal and the political. Her work sits at the intersection of Critical Dis/Ability Studies, Black feminist scholarship, and Caribbean epistemology.

She doesn't study these intersections from a distance — she inhabits them. Her positionality is not a disclaimer appended to the methodology section; it is the engine of her inquiry. As a Crip, Caribbean-born woman navigating the academy, she brings lived knowledge to every research question she poses.

Her scholarship is animated by a refusal to separate the intellectual from the embodied, the scholarly from the poetic, the analytical from the creative. This is not interdisciplinarity as a buzzword — it is a necessary response to the inadequacy of any single framework for understanding complex, intersectional lives.

The Educator

Teaching, for Dr. KSP, is not transmission — it is transformation. Her pedagogy draws on critical disability pedagogy, culturally sustaining practices, and arts-based engagement to create classrooms where every body and every way of knowing is valued.

Students don't just learn about disability studies or Black feminist thought — they experience these frameworks as living, breathing tools for interrogating the world they move through daily.

The Poet

Poetry is not a hobby — it is a method. Dr. KSP's poetic practice is inseparable from her scholarly work. She uses poetic inquiry as a research methodology, crafting verse that functions simultaneously as data, analysis, and theory.

Her poems have been performed at academic conferences, community events, and public lectures — each time demonstrating that the line between art and scholarship is not a boundary but a bridge.