Haverford College

Early Career Scholars Talk by Lindsey Grubbs, Assistant Professor of Bioethics, Case Western Reserve University Medical School

Talk on Wednesday, March
20, at 4:30pm in LUT 200 (tea at 4:15pm)

“Abby Folsom’s Incarceration: the Prison, the Asylum, and the Politics of Nineteenth-Century Abolition”

Abstract: In 1842, Abby Folsom, an outspoken and eccentric
campaigner for women’s rights and abolition, was arrested for speaking in the
streets of Boston. Taken first to the Leverett-street jail and then to the
Worcester Insane Asylum, Folsom moved between institutional spaces. Authorities
were clearly interested in containing Folsom, but struggled to determine which
carceral environment—the prison, the asylum, or the poor house—was most
appropriate. Focusing on writing by and about Folsom, this talk will ask how
anti-asylum advocacy intersected with other contemporaneous activist movements.

Lindsey Grubbs is Assistant Professor of Bioethics at Case Western Reserve University, where she focuses on the history, literature, and ethics of psychiatry and neuroscience. She is at work on a book about the relationship between literature and psychiatric diagnosis in nineteenth-century America.

Sponsored by the Early Career Scholars Fund, and the Ethical Inquiry &
Initiatives Fund.