OPEN ACCESS! A Cultural History of Disability
GW English will hold a celebration of the publication of A Cultural History of Disability in 2021. This will most likely be an online event as our 2020 celebration was postponed due to the pandemic. We will announce the details of this event in early 2021, but in the meantime: the six volumes are open access for most of December to mark the International Day of Disabled People (December 3, 2020)! These six volumes focus on Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Long Eighteenth Century, the Long Nineteenth Century, and the Modern Age.
Access the volumes at THIS LINK.
A Cultural History of Disability includes numerous participants from GW. The general editors for the six-volume series are David Bolt and GW English Professor Robert McRuer. The volume on the Middle Ages is edited by Professor Jonathan Hsy, along with Tory V. Pearman and Joshua R. Eyler, and the volume on the Modern Age is edited by Professor David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder. Department Chair Professor Maria Frawley has a chapter in the Nineteenth Century volume and PhD candidate Emily Lathrop has a chapter in the Renaissance volume. The Nineteenth Century volume is co-edited by Joyce Huff (GW English PhD, 2001) and Martha Stoddard Holmes. The volume on the Modern Age includes contributions from PhD candidate Zara Richter, Samuel Yates (GW English PhD, 2019), and Theodora Danylevich (GW English PhD, 2018). The Renaissance volume also includes a chapter by Gallaudet Professor Jennifer Nelson, who received her BA from GW English in 1988. All six volumes of A Cultural History of Disability are available in Gelman Library, but take advantage of open access to check out this great scholarship now.
A Cultural History of Disability spans more than 2,500 years. Bolt and McRuer write in the series preface: “A ‘system of representation,’ according to Stuart Hall, ‘consists, not of individual concepts, but of different ways of organizing, clustering, arranging, and classifying concepts, and of establishing complex relations between them.’ From this cultural studies perspective, a cultural history of disability is attuned to how disabled people have been caught up in systems of representation that, over the centuries (and with real, material effects), have variously contained, disciplined, marginalized, or normalized them. A cultural history of disability also, however, traces the ways in which disabled people themselves have authored or contested representations, shifting or altering the complex relations of power that determine the meanings of disability experience.”
Huff and Stoddard Holmes will be the keynotes at the virtual celebration. Watch this space for more information.
