Education

2004 University of Maryland, B.A.
2006 University of South Florida, M.A.
2012 University of South Florida, Ph.D.

Courses Taught

Reading Locally and Globally

Career Specialties

McNabb's primary areas of research are premodern studies and disability studies. Both fields rely heavily on interdisciplinary approaches, and her work reflects those approaches, as she draws on religious, literary, dramatic, and philosophical texts in my publications. Moreover, McNabb values open access scholarship and public-facing humanities projects, so her research extends across multiple media.

Professional and Community Activities

McNabb's earliest work focuses on how semiotics can disrupt concepts of truth within premodern drama. Her peer-reviewed articles “Hocus Pocus and the Croxton Play of the Sacrament” (in Early Theatre), “Shakespeare’s Semiotics and the Problem of Falstaff” (in Studies in Philology), and “Night of the Living Bread: Unstable Signs in Chester’s ‘Antichrist’” (in Early Theatre) all explore how meaning can be deconstructed when it shifts from text on a page to spoken words on a stage. 

More recently, McNabb's scholarly attention has turned to premodern disability studies. She is the General Editor and a contributor for the Medieval Disability Sourcebook: Western Europe, which catalogs over forty primary texts related to disability in the Middle Ages, and she has one peer-reviewed article, “Dramatic Prosthesis: Embodying Disability in Lear” (in Disability Studies Quarterly), as well as a forthcoming chapter “Dramatic Prosthesis: Staging Disability in Medieval English Drama” (in The Oxford Handbook of Disability and Literatures in English, c. 700–1500).

McNabb's current book project, a monograph titled Dramatic Prosthesis: Disability and Drama and under contract with the University of Michigan Press, combines her previous interests, as it returns to her interest in semiotics and signification in performance but instead considers how bodies, and particularly disabled bodies, signify rather than language.

Honors and Awards

American Society for Theater Research, Grant for Researchers with Heavy Teaching Loads, Fall 2023.
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Short-Term Residency, Fall 2021-Spring 2022.
Aaron Swartz Award for Best Web Text, “Ableist Language.” Writing Commons, 2022.
NEH Summer Stipend, Summer 2021.
Honorable Mention. “Staging Disability in Medieval Drama.” Lone Medievalist Scholarship Award, 2018.
Best Interpretive Essay, “Night of the Living Bread: Unstable Signs in Chester’s ‘Antichrist,’” Early Theatre, 2017.