Celebrating Recent Work by Rachel Adams

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by Rachel Adams

From birth to death, we care and are cared for by others. Yet we rarely acknowledge care except when it fails. In Love, Money, Duty, Rachel Adams examines the stories we tell about care, those who do the work, and those who depend on it. These narratives, she argues, help us better understand our complicated feelings about care and the obligations that come with it.

Combining insightful and compassionate readings of writers and artists—among them Toni Morrison, Susan Sontag, Roz Chast, Sally Mann, and Jamaica Kincaid—with stories of her own experiences, Adams analyzes the work, feelings, and ethical dilemmas associated with care, including unwelcome emotions such as boredom, resentment, exhaustion, and disgust. From the universal dependence of infancy to elder care and from the intimacy of home and family to institutions like hospitals, nursing facilities, and asylums, Love, Money, Duty considers our ambivalence about vulnerability and need and how it is shaped by capitalism, race, and gender.

Drawing from moral philosophy, gender and queer theory, critical race and disability studies, and health humanities, Adams treats care as a form of work, a feeling, an ethic, and an art. Exploring the radical possibilities of care and the devastating consequences of its failure, this book invites readers to appreciate care that works, recognizing the creativity and resourcefulness of dependent people and their caregivers.

About the Author

is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Her books include Raising Henry: A Memoir of Motherhood, Disability, and Discovery (2014). Rachel Adams specializes in 20th- and 21st-century American literature, disability studies and health humanities, theories of race, gender, and sexuality, and food studies. Her latest book, Love, Money, Duty: Stories of Care in Our Time, was published by Columbia University Press in 2025.

About the Speakers

is a Professor and the Chair of the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Hart specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century English literatures, with an emphasis on modernism, poetry, contemporary writing, and literary theory. He is also interested in connections between literature and the visual arts and between literary history and political history. He regularly teaches Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization in the Columbia Core Curriculum.

is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Critical Inquiry at the University of Connecticut. Her work spans various fields such as sociology, feminist disability studies, deaf studies, and science and technology studies. Her focus is on exposing ableism as a central organizing principle of society. She documents how ableism structures all of our lives (disabled or not), how it intersects with various other systems of oppression, and how we can resist it.

is a cultural theorist who focuses on racial, sexual and transgender histories and cultural productions. He is the author of Nobody Is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) and Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), winner of the John Boswell Prize from the American Historical Association, the William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the Modern Language Association, the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction, the Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, and an honorable mention from the American Library Association Stonewall Book Award Committee.

is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Barnard College. Her research and teaching interests include healthcare, inequality, race/ethnicity, development, and science and technology studies. Professor Zhou's research has examined health inequalities in both the US and global setting. One line of research explores the impact of global health policies. Her current book project examines how global health efforts to address the HIV epidemic reconfigures local healthcare institutions and has unintended consequences for policymaking, healthcare practices, and the lives of providers and patients in Malawi. Another line of research looks at racial health inequalities in the US, focusing on the meaning of race in delivering racially targeted health services.

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Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Heyman Center for the Humanities, East Campus Residence Hall, New York, United States