Dr. Jaipreet Virdi

An award-winning historian whose research focuses on the ways medicine and technology impact the lived experiences of disabled people.

Born in Kuwait to Sikh parents, Dr. Virdi lost her hearing at age four to bacterial meningitis. By age six, her working-class family immigrated to Toronto, Ontario, where she would later attend a school for deaf and hard-of-hearing children. A product of “mainstreamed” education, Dr. Virdi learned to communicate through lip-reading and her hearing aids. Years of navigation within deaf/hearing spaces, along with working in retail marketing and fashion merchandising have influenced how she analyzes people’s relationships with their technologies. Her experiences with stage IV endometriosis and ovarian cancer have also shaped her advocacy for accessible healthcare.

Dr. Virdi is an Organization of American Historians (OAH) Distinguished Lecturer.

Learn more

Writer and Author

Over-the-counter hearing aids, eugenic fitness, disabled design, audiometry, endometriosis…these are some of the topics Dr. Virdi has written for in public and academic publications. Her essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Psyche, New Internationalist, Bitch Media, The Washington Post, and more. She has book chapters in multiple international edited collections and aims to disseminate her work as widely as possible.

International Speaker

Dr. Virdi’s writing and public speaking style is an ingenious blend of narrative that weaves archive research with material culture, lyrical history, and personal memoir. Adhering to the notion a historian’s responsibility is to disseminate collective histories as broadly as possible, Dr. Virdi shares her own experiences—of deafness, endometriosis, ovarian cancer—to clarify medical and disability contexts, and to advocate for accessible healthcare and technology.

Weaving together lyrical history and personal memoir, Virdi powerfully examines society’s—and her own—perception of life as a deaf person in America.

At the age of four, Jaipreet Virdi’s world went silent. A severe case of meningitis left her alive but deaf, suddenly treated differently by everyone. Her deafness downplayed by society and doctors, she struggled to “pass” as hearing for most of her life. Countless cures, treatments, and technologies led to dead ends. Never quite deaf enough for the Deaf community or quite hearing enough for the “normal” majority, Virdi was stuck in aural limbo for years. It wasn’t until her thirties, exasperated by problems with new digital hearing aids, that she began to actively assert her deafness and reexamine society’s—and her own—perception of life as a deaf person in America.

Read Dr. Virdi’s first book, available wherever books are sold!

Awards:
2022 American Association for the History of Medicine, Welch Medal
2021 British Society for the History of Science, Hughes Prize