Images of disability pervade language and literature, yet disability is, as the volume's introduction notes, "the ubiquitous unspoken topic in contemporary culture." The twenty-five essays in Disability Studies provide perspectives on disabled people and on disability in the humanities, art, the media, medicine, psychology, the academy, and society.
Edited and introduced by Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and containing an afterword by Michael Bérubé (author of Life As We Know It), the volume is rich in its cast of characters (including John Bulwer, Teresa de Cartagena, Audre Lorde, Oliver Sacks, Samuel Johnson, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman); in its powerful, authentic accounts of disabled conditions (deafness, blindness, MS, cancer, the absence of limbs); in its different settings (ancient Greece, medieval Spain, Nazi Germany, the modern United States); and in its mix of the intellectual and the emotional, of subtle theory and plainspoken autobiography.
Snyder is Assistant Professor of Film and Literature at Northern Michigan University.
Brenda Brueggemann is currently Professor of English, Vice-Chair of the Rhetoric Composition and Literacy Program, and Acting Director of Literacy Studies at Ohio State University. She is also the former coordinator of the Disability Studies Program and American Sign Language Program at Ohio State University and currently edits the field's oldest journal, Disability Studies Quarterly. She has served on several of the Nisonger Center's related grants/projects.
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson is Associate Professor of Women's Studies at Emory University. She is the author of Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Disability in American Literature and Culture and coeditor of Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.