A colloquium in disability studies at Haverford College, Chase Auditorium, Oct. 3, 4:15-6:00; reception following the presentation from 6:00-6:30. Sponsored by the English Department of Haverford College.
(See directions to the college and campus map.)
The Speakers
Sue Schweik: "The Ugly Laws of Disability Studies" "'No person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or deformed in any way so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object shall expose himself to public view.' Is this law, commonly cited by disability studies scholars (as a Chicago 1911 municipal ordinance), an urban legend? This talk explores both the complex histories of the law and the current development of "disability studies," discussing why and how activists and artists refer back to "ugly law" today.
Susan Schweik is Associate Professor of English and co-holder of the Presidential Chair in Undergraduate Education at the University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of A Gulf So Deeply Cut: American Women Poets and the Second World War. Her fields include modern and contemporary American poetry and disability theory; courses she has taught in disability studies include "Body Theory and Disability Studies," "Literature and Disability" and "Disability and Digital Storytelling." She is currently completing two books, one which examines the relation of disabled Bay Area poets to discourses of disability and to the developing disability rights movement, and one with the same title as this talk. She is also co-chair of Berkeley's innovative and developing interdisciplinary minor in disabilities studies, which "brings together subjects as diverse as art, engineering and political science to examine a much-overlooked subject: the lives and experiences of disabled people."
Martha Stoddard Holmes is Assistant Professor of Literature and Writing Studies, California State University, San Marcos, where she teaches Victorian Literature, Cultural Studies/Body Studies, Cultural History of the Body, and (most recently) Advanced Creative Writing. Stoddard Holmes’s published essays explore and historicize disability in Victorian melodrama, the novels of Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens, and the journalism of Henry Mayhew. Her book Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disabilities in Victorian Culture is forthcoming in 2003 from University of Michigan Press in its Corporealities series. Her current projects include "’The Grandest Badge of His Art’: Four Victorian Doctors, Pain Relief, and the Art of Medicine" (to be published in the Proceedings of the 2nd History of Pain Symposium, UCLA) and a special issue of the Journal of Medical Humanities on "Disability and Medicine: Beyond the Medical Model," co-edited with Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and scheduled to appear in 2004.
Rachel Adams teaches in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, offering courses on American literature, film, race and gender studies, many of which incorporate discussions of disability. She is the author of Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination (University of Chicago Press, 2001); co-editor (with David Savran) of The Masculinity Studies Reader (Blackwell Publishers, 2002); and editor of Kate Chopin's The Awakening and Selected Stories.
Readings in Disability Studies Links to Disability Websites Hearing assistive technology available.
