Fireside Chat: Roundtable: Disability, Literature, Art, and Civil Rights

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.