REGISTER

Thursday, October 15th, 2026 | 1:30 PM EST

Virtual Event | Free

Join us as we talk to Sari Altschuler, author of Before Disability: A History of American Citizenship, and Vanessa Warne, author of By Touch Alone: Blindness and Reading in Nineteenth-Century Culture, as they discuss their cultural histories addressing disability, literature, art, and civil rights.

Before Disability: A History of American Citizenship (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2026)
In the wake of the American Revolution, many of the differences we now call disabilities could be accommodated into citizenship—and for some even exemplified its promises. By the antebellum period, however, disability was becoming a powerful, racialized tool of civic exclusion and, by the century’s end, a target for eugenic elimination. Before Disability: A History of American Citizenship tells the story of how this dramatic transformation occurred.

Sari Altschuler is associate professor of English and founding director of the Health, Humanities, and Society Program at Northeastern University. She is the author of Before Disability: A History of American Citizenship (Penn Press, 2026) and The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States (Penn Press, 2018), as well as coeditor with Jonathan Metzl and Priscilla Wald of Keywords for Health Humanities (NYU Press, 2023). With David Weimer she directs Touch This Page! Making Sense of the Ways We Read, a multi-local and online exhibition about the multisensory experiences of reading, which won the Library Company’s Innovation Award in 2019.

Available for purchase at Penn Press.

By Touch Alone: Blindness and Reading in Nineteenth-Century Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2025) puts the history of disability into conversation with the history of books. Guided by the experiences of the first generation of blind people to learn to read by touch, this book explores the ways in which raised-print books changed not only individual lives but also nineteenth-century culture.

Vanessa Warne is a Professor in the Department of English, Theatre, Film & Media at the University of Manitoba (Treaty One Territory). Her current research explores the intersection of the history of craft and the history of disability. She has published widely on nineteenth-century literature and disability, including serving as the co-editor of a special issue of Disability Studies Quarterly on blindness studies. She has co-hosted two international conferences on critical blindness studies, is a co-creator of the Crafting Communities Project, and a co-host of the Victorian Samplings podcast.

Available for purchase at University of Michigan Press.

REGISTER

Tuesday, November 17th, 2026 | 7:00 PM EST
Virtual Event | Free

What can the Library Company’s collections teach us about the intersections of women’s lives, disability, and the law? Dr. Jennifer Reiss, the 2025–2026 Davida Tenenbaum Deutsch Dissertation Fellow, will share materials she explored during her fellowship to uncover how women experienced and navigated legal and social systems in early America. This program will highlight the power of everyday documents as “keys” to understanding the past, in this case revealing histories of gender, disability, and lived experience.

Jennifer Reiss is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pennsylvania working on the North Atlantic in the long eighteenth century. Jennifer is particularly interested in women and gender, early modern medicine and disability, and British and early American legal history. Her dissertation project, provisionally titled Undone Bodies: Gender and the Making of Disability in Early America, reconsiders how disability as a social category was constructed and experienced before burgeoning clinical understandings of bodily difference in the antebellum era.

Tuesday, December 1st, 2026 | 7:00 PM EST

Published for the 250th anniversary of the United States, When the Declaration of Independence Was News focuses on the nation’s founding document at the moment of its creation in 1776, before anyone knew what the legacy of the Declaration would be or if the United States would win the war against Great Britain. It explores how the Declaration was communicated to people in the new nation and around the Atlantic world and reveals the stories of the many people involved in the process of declaring independence, from printers to soldiers to diplomats to translators.

Dr. Emily Sneff is an early American historian and leading expert on the Declaration of Independence. She earned her Ph.D. in History from William & Mary. She is a consulting curator for exhibitions marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration at the Museum of the American Revolution and Historic Trappe.

Sponsored by the Program in Early American Economy and Society