Biography

Natasha Rossi is an Assistant Professor of Instruction in the Intellectual Heritage Program. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Columbia University in 2012, where she taught in the Core Curriculum (Contemporary Civilization) before joining the IH faculty in the fall of 2014. Her dissertation, "The Production of Autism Diagnoses within an Institutional Network: Towards a Theory of Diagnosis" argues for an institutional understanding of diagnosis in which the diagnostic act is considered not in isolation, but as part of a prolonged process that is neither independent of the content of the diagnostic category itself nor its historical context. In the case of autism, parents and children are processed through a network of agents and organizations, and it is this institutional funnel that eventually leads to the assignment of the diagnostic label of autism. Natasha is a co-author of The Autism Matrix (Polity, 2010) and is currently working on an article examining the historical use of autism diagnostic instruments and the role they have played in altering the autistic prototype over time.