HISTORICAL NEURODIVERSITY STUDIES

A NEW PARADIGM OF EXPERIENCE

Bradley J. Irish

History and Theory 64, no. 3 (2025)

Review essay on Rob Boddice and Mark Smith, Emotion, Sense, Experience (Cambridge University Press, 2020)

In Emotion, Sense, Experience (2020), Rob Boddice and Mark Smith put forth a paradigm-shifting argument for how we might employ experience as a master category of historical analysis—one that sees matters of cognition, emotion, and sensation as crucially embraided in human subjectivity. Building on their foundation, this review essay imagines the possibilities of a historical neurodiversity studies, an outlook that sees human neurological diversity as vital to understanding experience. The history of experience, I suggest, is the history of neurodiversity, and the history of neurodiversity is the history of human experience.