Professor David Bolt

Job Title: PROFESSOR IN DISABILITY STUDIES
Department: Disability Studies
Extension: 0151 291 3346
Email: boltd@hope.ac.uk

I have a first class degree and an AHRC-funded doctorate from the University of Staffordshire. I am a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and have been working at Hope since 2009. I am Director of the Centre for Culture & Disability Studies in the School of Social Science, where I am also Professor of Disability Studies and Interdisciplinarity and course lead on the Disability Studies MA.

I am founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies (Liverpool University Press), a quarterly, online and print publication that is part of the Project MUSE collection and is Scopus indexed.

I am editor of the book series Autocritical Disability Studies (Routledge), I am also editor with my US colleagues Elizabeth J. Donaldson and Julia Miele Rodas, of the book series Literary Disability Studies (Palgrave Macmillan/Springer), general editor with my GWU colleague Robert McRuer of A Cultural History of Disability (Bloomsbury), and have places on various editorial boards.

I have organized and co-organized events at Hope, University of Lancaster, Manchester Metropolitan University, and the University of Staffordshire. I am founder of the International Network of Literary & Cultural Disability Scholars and was the first Honorary Research Fellow in the Centre for Disability Research at the University of Lancaster.

I am joint editor of the books, The Madwoman and the Blindman: Jane Eyre, Discourse, Disability (Ohio State University Press, 2012) and Disability, Avoidance, and the Academy: Challenging Resistance (Routledge, 2016), and co-guest editor of the special issue Theorizing Culture and Disability: Interdisciplinary Dialogues (Review of Disability Studies, University of Hawaii at Manoa). I have many international publications to my name, including journal articles, book chapters, special issues, and works of creative writing. Many of my articles have been included in The Disability Archive UK (University of Leeds) and a few have been translated into Dutch, Korean, and Spanish.

I am author of The Metanarrative of Blindness: A Re-Reading of Twentieth-Century Anglophone Writing (University of Michigan Press, 2014), Cultural Disability Studies in Education: Interdisciplinary Navigations of the Normative Divide (Routledge, 2019), and Disability Duplicity and the Formative Cultural Identity Politics of Generation X (Routledge, 2024); and editor of Changing Social Attitudes Toward Disability: Perspectives from Historical, Cultural, and Educational Studies (Routledge, 2014), Metanarratives of Disability: Culture, Assumed Authority, and the Normative Social Order (Routledge, 2021), and Finding Blindness: International Constructions and Deconstructions (Routledge, 2023).