This Tuesday evening, Feb 4, visiting English professor Elizabeth Bearden will give the second lecture in a new series from the University of King’s College, “Representations of Disability in Historical, Scientific and Artistic Perspectives.”
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Bearden is a professor of early modern literature and disability studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her talk will reflect on how early modern writers and artists with disabilities used consolation literature to build authority, community and pride across the centuries. This lecture is based on her forthcoming book, Crip Authority: Disability and the Art of Consolation in the Renaissance, which is due in September and available to pre-order here.
Crip Authority looks at how various disabled Renaissance artists and authors—including John Milton, Francesco Petrarca and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra—used the genre of consolation writing to understand and represent their lived experiences with disability. Through this art form, artists and authors defied ableist notions of who could write and have access to self-representation and formed a new path for expressing their military, spiritual, political and writerly authority—into what Bearden calls crip authority.
Bearden is a scholar and teacher of early modern literature and disability studies with training in comparative literature, classical literature, the history of rhetoric and visual culture studies. She writes that her other talents “include being blind, working with a guide dog, and being a power-user of adaptive technology.” She has published two monographs: The Emblematics of the Self: Ekphrasis and Identity in Renaissance Imitations of Greek Romance in 2012; and Monstrous Kinds: Body, Space, and Narrative in Renaissance Representations of Disability in 2019. The latter won the Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in the Humanities.
Bearden’s lecture is at 7pm Tuesday at Alumni Hall on the King’s College campus, 6350 Coburg Road. It will also be available to watch here.
Upcoming lectures in the series include:
- February 25: Nicole Ineese-Nash, who will present “Decolonizing Disability: Indigenous Perspectives on Children with Disabilities and the Colonial Construction of Disability.”
- March 11: A screening of the film Our Hearts are not Disabled and a Q&A with the film’s director, Josh Dunn.
- March 18: Dr. Saul Green Memorial Lecture featuring Mara Mills, who will present “Vent: Disability Distributive Justice and the History of Ventilator Allocation Protocols.”
- April 1: An art showcase and celebration with presentations by artists with intellectual disabilities from three L’Arche Communities across Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Much of their work is currently on display at King’s on the second floor of the New Academic Building.
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This article appears in Feb 1-28, 2025.
