A special collection of written and visual resources from Liverpool Hope University has been made publicly available to mark UK Disability History Month.
The annual event, now in it’s 12th year, seeks to celebrate the lives of disabled people, to challenge disablism and historical oppression, and to achieve equality.
UK Disability History Month 2021 has now launched and will run until the 18th December.
Some of the key themes being explored this year are ‘Disability and Hidden Impairment’ as well as ‘Disability Sex and Relationships’.
And Hope’s Centre for Culture and Disability Studies (CCDS) has made a number of influential seminars, books and journal articles available for anyone to utilise for the duration of the month.
Dr Owen Barden, Associate Professor of Disability Studies, has created a thought-provoking playlist of films on the CCDS YouTube channel.
One of those videos sees Dr Michael Rembis, of America’s University at Buffalo, discussing his research into the emotional lives of women and men living in the 19th century United States who considered themselves “mad” or “insane” - or who were defined as such by family, friends, associates, medical professionals - but who were living outside of an asylum.
Another sees Dr Ugo Pavan Dalla Torre, of the University of Turin, Italy, considering the history of disabled ex-servicemen during and after the Great War, men whose injured bodies became ‘proof of participation, the proof of an experience’ in the conflict.
David Bolt, Professor in Disability Studies at Hope, and his colleagues have also granted free access to an authoritative six-volume publication on the history of disability representation - entitled A Cultural History of Disability.
The fascinating books chart the cultural history of disability from antiquity right up until the modern age.
You can access those via the link below:
https://www.bloomsburyculturalhistory.com/
Meanwhile the CCDS has also provided access to five selected articles from The Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, of which Prof Bolt is founding Editor-in-Chief.
Those articles can be accessed via the link below:
https://liverpooluniversitypress.blog/category/journals/
Further information:
A Cultural History of Disability is a set of books published by Bloomsbury under the general
editorship of Hope’s Professor David Bolt and his American colleague Professor Robert
McRuer (George Washington University). A PROSE Award 2021 finalist, the work
comprises six volumes:
- A Cultural History of Disability in Antiquity, edited by Christian Laes;
- A Cultural History of Disability in the Middle Ages, edited by Jonathan Hsy, Tory V.
Pearman, and Joshua R. Eyler;
- A Cultural History of Disability in the Renaissance, edited by Susan Anderson and
Liam Haydon;
- A Cultural History of Disability in the Long Eighteenth Century, edited by D.
Christopher Gabbard and Susannah B. Mintz;
- A Cultural History of Disability in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Joyce L.
Huff and Martha Stoddard Holmes;
- A Cultural History of Disability in the Modern Age, edited by David T. Mitchell and
Sharon L. Snyder.
Professor David Bolt is Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability
Studies and has selected the following articles that will be free to read throughout Disability
History Month:
- Multi-Sensorial Pedagogy for Art History Education: Integrating the Collective
Wisdom of People Who are Blind and Have Low Vision to Reconsider Conventional
Academic Norms by Yayoi Mashimo;
- Pedagogy and Practice: Teaching an Interdisciplinary Art History and Disability
Studies Course by Lucienne Dorrance Auz;
- Demanding Money with Menaces: Fear and Loathing in the Archipelago of
Confinement by Owen Barden;
- “With a Smile and a Song”: Representations of People with Dwarfism in 1930s
Cinema by Keri Watson;
- A World Turned Upside Down: Hop-Frog, Freak Shows, and Representations of
Dwarfism by Brenda Tyrrell.