Join us for the second in the Public Lecture Series: Representations of Disability in Historical, Scientific and Artistic Perspectives on February 4 at Alumni Hall.
Elizabeth Bearden will present her lecture entitled, “Crip Touches Across Time or Getting in Touch with Disability in the Renaissance.”
Drawing on material from her forthcoming book, Crip Authority: Disability and the Art of Consolation in the Renaissance (U Michigan P, 2025), Prof. Bearden will consider how early modern writers and artists with disabilities drew on consolatory literature to enhance their authority and to create a sense of disability community and pride across the centuries.
Elizabeth B. Bearden is a professor of English at the University of Wisconson-Madison. Her interests are in early modern prose and poetry, Reception of Antiquity, Comparative Literature, formal and philosophical approaches to literary study, Disability Studies. Her previous publications include The Emblematics of the Self: Ekphrasis and Identity in Renaissance Imitations of Greek Romance, published by the University of Toronto Press in 2012. Her second book, Monstrous Kinds: Body, Space and Narrative in Renaissance Representations of Disability, was recently published in the University of Michigan Corporealities: Discourses of Disability series in 2019 and was the winner of the Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in the Humanities. She has published articles in PMLA, JEMCS, Ancient Narrative Supplementum, Arizona Journal for Hispanic Cultural Studies, and E-Humanista/Cervantes. She has also directed a digital humanities project documenting the funeral of Sir Philip Sidney.
