Autism and Academia: A Personal Note

A few days ago, I received my autism diagnosis. Just a few weeks before my 38th birthday. Writing this feels both daunting and liberating—I want to be open about it, and to put words on some of the experiences that have shaped my life as an academic without me fully understanding why.

From a very early age, I was drawn to systems of communication. At five or six, I remember sitting with books on ancient Egypt, trying to translate hieroglyphs. I had no idea that Champollion had even existed. It wasn’t just curiosity—it was an obsession. I needed to decode these strange marks, to make them speak. That instinct never left me. That and a strange passion for dinosaurs. And volcanos. And trains. (In retrospect, I wonder why no one noticed anything!). Once in university, this passion grew into my lifelong interest in historical sociolinguistics: how people once spoke to one another, how meaning was negotiated in dialogue. Eventually, it led me to Chaucer, to the play of different voices in his poetry, overlapping and contradicting one another. From there, I moved into translation studies—another form of decoding, another attempt to render voices and emotions across boundaries. Each of these steps, I now see, was a continuation of the same drive: to unlock systems of meaning and rebuild them in a new form.

My thinking has always felt almost mechanical, as if my brain were a computer parsing binary code. If the sequence of 1s and 0s is suddenly interrupted by a “2,” I cannot simply ignore it. I obsess until the pattern makes sense again. This insistence on order has been both a strength and a struggle. I obsess until the pattern makes sense again. This insistence on order has been both a strength and a struggle. It allows me to see structures, macro-connections, and patterns in texts that others might miss. It also pushes me naturally toward pluridisciplinarity, since following a pattern often means crossing boundaries—between literature and linguistics, history and sociology, or language and translation. But it also means that the messiness of social life—its ambiguity, its lack of clear signals—can be overwhelming.

This is especially clear at conferences. Giving a paper is straightforward: I can prepare, polish, rehearse. I know exactly how long it will take me, and how to modulate my voice to make it sound vaguely interesting. What unsettles me is everything around it: reading faces, gauging reactions, knowing when to step in or withdraw. I haverecently discovered that I can perceive expressions, but not their meaning. When I lecture, I often cannot tell whether people are bored, tired, angry, or captivated. That uncertainty is exhausting. Networking receptions, coffee breaks, or dinners are not just uncomfortable—they can be impossible, sending me back to the refuge of my hotel room. The fact that the 2024 New Chaucer Society congress took place in a hotel in Passadena was particularly revealing, because I just had to pop into an elevator to get back to my room. Usually, conference locations do not offer that kind of comfort. I certainly missed a lot of things but it was a relief. For years, I explained this as introversion. But my diagnosis has helped me understand that it isn’t just shyness. It’s part of the way my brain works.

Now, why share this? Because awareness matters. Academia often assumes that its spaces—seminars, conferences, roundtables—are neutral and accessible to all. They are not. And not only for autistic people: barriers of money, precarious academic positions, gender, race, and other inequalities shape who gets to participate, who feels welcome, and who is left out. Recognizing these structural obstacles alongside neurodiversity is essential if we want to imagine a more inclusive and genuinely open academic community. But for autistic academics, these spaces can be minefields of uncertainty and anxiety. Recognizing that doesn’t mean lowering expectations; it means broadening our understanding of what scholarly engagement looks like. Contribution doesn’t always happen at the reception desk or in the crowded dining hall. Sometimes it happens in writing, in one-on-one exchanges, or in the obsessive dedication to research that comes from a different neurological rhythm. Autism is not just difficulty. It is also perspective, focus, resilience, and the capacity to see the world—whether in hieroglyphs, in Chaucer’s polyphony, or in the delicate act of translation—from angles others might overlook.

I share this as a way of acknowledging that difference, and as a call for more awareness. For colleagues, for students, for institutions: making space for neurodiversity doesn’t diminish academic life. It enriches it.