Schedule

Welcome and introduction to the institute; participants’ self-introductions; logistics and paperwork; library cards.

Introduction to Deaf Culture and ASL

Reading: Holcomb, Introduction to American Deaf Culture, chs. 1, 2, 3, 7, 12.

What is the History of Disability?

Readings: 1) Davis, “Introduction: Disability, Normality, and Power;” 2) Shakespeare, “The Social Model of Disability;” 3) Linker, “On the Borderland of Medical and Disability History,” and comments; 4) Grech, “Decolonising Eurocentric Disability Studies;” 5) Livingston, “Insights from an African History of Disability.”

Introduction to U.S. Disability History

Reading: Kim Nielsen, A Disability History of the United States, entire.

American Deaf History

Readings: 1) Baynton, Forbidden Signs, chs. 2, 3, 6, epilogue; 2) Burch, Signs of Resistance, chs. 2, 4, 5; 3) Greenwald and Van Cleve, “‘A Deaf Variety of the Human Race’.”

Immigration, Disability, and Eugenics

Reading: Baynton, Defectives in the Land: Disability and Immigration in the Age of Eugenics, entire.

Disabled Veterans

Reading: Kinder, Paying with Their Bodies: American War and the Problem of the Disabled Veteran, Introduction and chapters 4, 7, and Epilogue.

(National Museum of American History)

Material Culture

Session will be held at the National Museum of American History

Reading: Ott, “Disability Things.”

Histories of Madness

Readings: Selections from 1) Pietikäinen, Madness: A History; 2) Eghigian, From Madness to Mental Health.

Histories of Institutionalized People

Readings: 1) Burch, “Dislocated Histories;’” 2) Burch and Joyner, “The Disremembered Past.”

Weekly debriefing (2:45-3 p.m.)

Disability in the Middle Ages

Readings: Metzler, Disability in Medieval Europe, 1-10; 2) Eyler, Disability in the Middle Ages, 1-8; 3) Premodern Dis/Ability History: A Companion, 59-68, 203-206; 4) Turner, Madness in Medieval Law and Custom, 17-38.

Disability in Early Modern Europe and in the Industrial Revolution

Readings: 1) Turner, Disability in Eighteenth-Century England, 125-145; 2) Curtis and Thompson, “A Plentiful Crop of Cripples;” 3) Selections from Disability in the Industrial Revolution: Physical Impairment in British Coalmining, 1780-1880.

Blindness in Modern France

Readings: 1) Husson, Reflections: The Life and Writings of a Young Blind Woman in Post-Revolutionary France, 1-14, 44-65; 2) Kudlick, “Modernity’s Miss-Fits.”

Disability and the Holocaust: The T4 Program

Readings: Selections from 1) Lifton, The Nazi Doctors; 2) Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide; 3) Knittel, The Historical Uncanny.

(with coffee break)

African Histories of Disability

Readings: TBD

Histories of Disability in South Asia

Readings: 1) Buckingham, “Patient Welfare.” 2) Nair, selections from Fungible Bodies: Histories of Disability in British India, 1850-1950.

Disability in Japanese History

Readings: 1) Morse, “Chakagi Zato (The Tea-Sniffing Blind Men);” 2) Robertson, “Blood Talks: Eugenic Modernity and the Creation of New Japanese;” 3) Nakamura, Deaf in Japan, 70-93.

Disability in Middle Eastern  History

Reading: Scalenghe, Disability in the Ottoman Arab World, Introduction, Conclusion, Epilogue, and two additional chapters of one’s choosing (deafness, blindness, madness, intersex).