S02E05 | Beyond Ahab's Peg Leg: Disability in 19th-Century American Literature

C19: America in the 19th Century

How does looking back to a time before institutionalization and medicalization affect how we think about disability today? What would it mean to "crip" the classics? These are some of the questions answered by Professors Benjamin Reiss (Emory University), Ellen Samuels (UW Madison) and Sari Altschuler (Northeastern University) as they speak with Ittai Orr (Yale University) about the study of what Reiss calls the "disability cultures" of the 19th century. Making the case that such cultures deeply influenced what we now think of as mainstream American history and literature, they share their exciting research on Emerson, Thoreau and Fuller's ethics of care, the afterlives of nineteenth-century freakshows on the internet, and the impact of raised type and blind education on The Scarlet Letter, and they identify exciting new areas of study yet to be fully explored. This episode was produced by Ittai Orr with major support from Christine "Xine" Yao, Kristie Schlauraff, and Dan Kubis of the University of Pittsburgh Humanities Center. Episode transcript: https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/ca9039_4354c64b8ed0444fb5e7716b76434633.pdf