The two-day Symposium, scheduled for Feb. 15-16, 2024, is co-sponsored by the University of Minnesota (Minneapolis) and Macalester College (St. Paul). Thursday's events will run from 9:00am-6:00pm and Friday's from 9:00am-3:00pm. Folks are welcome to attend whatever sessions/programming they are interested in.
The Symposium will bring to the Twin Cities a group of leading scholars of early modernity to illuminate the intersections of disability and race in the global early modern period. Organized by longtime collaborators Jennifer E. Row (associate professor of French, UMN) and Penelope Geng (associate professor of English, Macalester College), the Symposium will focus on the interlocking histories of disability and race. Contemporary oppressive policies and attitudes that advance eugenics, ablenationalism, and state-sanctioned debilitation and disablement of communities of color are rooted in early modern notions of fitness, deservingness, godliness, and beauty. These belief systems often worked together to define what forms of bodyminds were considered “normal” (and worth preserving) and what forms were “abnormal,” “deformed,” “disabled,” and not worth saving.
The confirmed speakers are: Alani Hicks-Bartlett (Brown University), Andrew Bozio (Skidmore College), Urvashi Chakravarty (University of Toronto), Amrita Dhar (The Ohio State University), Ari Friedlander (University of Mississippi), Jonathan Hsy (George Washington University), Pablo García Piñar (University of Chicago), Wayne
Tan (Hope College), Katherine Schaap Williams (University of Toronto), and Ashley Williard (University of Southern Carolina).
How did the art and literature of the early modern period imagine able-bodiedness and disability as well as the institutional processes of disablement (such as state-neglect of diseased and impoverished communities or early carceral systems)? How did definitions of “ability” and “disability” shift during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth centuries—a period in European history that was marked by wars of religion, urbanization, colonization, and slavery? These are some of the questions the Symposium will explore.
Our Symposium will hold space for undergraduate students, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows to learn from, socialize, and collaborate with speakers. Undergraduate and graduate students from both of our institutions will have a chance to do hands-on research with invited speakers in the Twin Cities’ premodern archives (e.g., the UMN Wangensteen Library and the Minneapolis Institute of Art).
*The majority of events will be in a hybrid format (Zoom links will shared to the interested participants via Google Calendar invitations and when you submit this Google form).
Program for Uncommon Bodies Symposium
Day 1 (Feb. 15): UMN Liberal Arts Engagement Hub (Pillsbury Hall 120)
8:30 AM-9:00 AM CST | Coffee and Light Breakfast
9:00 AM-10:30 AM CST | Panel A: Colonial Encounters, Slavery, and Empire (Hybrid)
Andrew Bozio, “Sailing to Guiana: Protocolonial Desire and the Amphiboles of English Ablenationalism.”
Pablo García Piñar, “Utopias of Inclusion: Inca Garcilaso’s Critique of Disability Policing in the Early Modern Spanish Empire.”
Ashley Williard, ONLINE, “Numeracy and Disposability: Locating Madness in the French Atlantic.”
10:30 AM-11:00 AM CST | Coffee Break
11:00 AM-12:00 PM CST | Panel B: Disability, Diagnosis and Medicine (Hybrid)
Alani Hicks-Bartlett, “Disease, Diagnosis, and Failures of (Ad)ministration–Three Early Modern Examples.”
Wayne Tan, "Disability, Race, and Bodies: Medical Models of Human Anatomy in Early Modern Japan"
12:00-1:15 PM CST | Lunch Break
1:30-3:00 PM CST | UMN Wangensteen Library “Archive Dive”
4:00-6:00 PM CST | Minneapolis Institute of Art Visit
Day 2 (Feb. 16): Harmon Room, Macalester Library
For Maps, parking recommendation (free parking on the street!), and accessibility, check out Macalester Maps and Directions.
8:30 AM-9:00 AM CST | Coffee and Light Breakfast
9:00 AM-10:30 AM CST | Panel A:
Citizenship and (Un)belonging: Racial Formations and Disabling Encounters (Hybrid)
Ari Friedlander, “The Color of Potency: Naming and Maiming Whiteness in Shakespeare’s History Plays.”
Katherine Schaap Williams, “Crip Citizenship on the Early Modern Stage.”
Urvashi Chakravarty, “‘Most notoriously abused’: Carcerality, Race, and Madness in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.”
10:30 AM-11:00 AM CST | Coffee Break
11:00 AM-12:15 PM CST | Panel B: Tokens and Reciprocities: Disability and Race in Transit (Hybrid)
Jonathan Hsy “What, or Who, Is a Token? Race, Disability, and Travel in The Book of Margery Kempe.”
Amrita Dhar, “Acknowledgments, Reciprocities, and Collective Access in a Twenty-First-Century 'Third-World' Shakespeare on Stage: A Different Romeo and Juliet.”
12:15-1:30 PM CST | Pedagogy Working Lunch
1:45-3:00 PM CST | Event Wrap-Up and Keywords
