Source : RMBLF

The history of disability and the history of emotions are now two well established fields. Historians of disabilities have often referred to and included emotions in their historical narratives. Examples of these are the existing histories related to the instrumental place occupied by pity in telethons, the tangible presence of rage and anger in histories of disability activism or the reference to (un)happiness in histories dealing with the emergence of special education. Despite the seemingly overall presence of emotions in disabilities histories, however, a more detailed examination of the role played by emotions in the history of disability is lacking. On the basis of a wide range of historical case studies the organizers of the conference Histories of Disability and Emotions aim at moving forward our knowledge and insights with regard to the methodological and theoretical approaches towards emotional histories of disabilities. 

Programme :

Tuesday, 13 June 2023

All time indications are CET. Paper presentations are limited to 15 minutes.

9.30 AM: Welcoming remarks and introduction by Sara Scalenghe (Loyola University Maryland), Ninon Dubourg (University of Liège) & Pieter Verstraete (KU Leuven)

10 AM: PANEL 1 – Emotional normativities through time (Chair: Pieter Verstraete)

• Corinne Doria (Chinese University of Hong Kong): From Pride to Embarrassment: Perception of Myopia in the 19th Century and Early 20th Century
• Beck Chamberlain Heslop (University of Manchester): Feeling the Way: Emotional entanglements of white canes in Britain, c. 1960-1980
• Simonetta Polenghi & Anna Debè (Catholic University of the Sacred Heart): From Christian commiseration to patriotic pride. Eliciting emotions in readers of Italian children’s literature, magazines and school textbooks (1870-1930)

11.15 AM: Coffee break

11.30 AM: PANEL 2 – Biographical and archeological approaches to emotions (Chair: TBD)

• Gregory Carrier (University of Toronto): Sorrowful Parents and Joyful Brothers: Emotions in Two Biographies of Hermannus Contractus
• Mari Eyice (Stockholm University): Feeling dis/ability in 17th century Sweden
• June-Ann Greeley (Sacred Heart University): Reading “The Lament of the Old Woman of Beare”: Gendered Old Age as Disability

12.45 PM: Lunch break 

2 PM: PANEL 3 – Disability, emotions and experience (Chair: Ninon Dubourg)

• Michael Rembis (University at Buffalo): Madness, Affect, and Asylums in the 19th-century United States
• Wendy Turner (Augusta University): Emotion, Mental Health, and Intellectual Disabilities in the Legal and Administrative Records of Medieval England
• Silvia Carraro (University of Padua): Odi et amo? Daily Emotions towards Disabled People in Medieval Venice (14th-15th century)
• Maja Bondestam (Uppsala University): Disability and hot nature: How emotional, not physical, traits disqualified people from work and good manners according to late 18th century Swedish medicine

3.30 PM: Coffee break

4 PM: Keynote 1 by David Turner

Wednesday, 14 June 2023

10 AM: PANEL 4 – Emotional approaches to illness and disability (Chair: TBD)

• Saghar Bozorgi (University of Texas at Austin): Be Fearful and/but Heal Yourself : Analyzing Emotions about Disability and Healing in mid-20th Century Iran
• Emanuele Piazza (Università degli Studi di Catania): Healing Disabilities in the Diaologi of Gregory the Great
• Mia Edwards (University of Warwick): Physical Disability, Physicality, and Masculinity within the Plantation Labour System, 1800-1861
• Nicole Reibe (Loyola University Maryland): Silent Solidarity: Deafness, Anger, and Action in the Work of Teresa de Cartagena

11.30 AM: Coffee break

11.45 AM: PANEL 5 – The body and emotional politics (Chair: TBD)

• Bianca Frohne (Kiel University): Disability, Emotions, and Pain in Medieval and Early Modern Miracle Accounts
• Jack Litchfield (Independent scholar): Maimed, Wounded, Febled, and Debrused: Feeling Hurts in Late Medieval English Martial Culture
• Wei Yu Wayne Tan (Hope College): Disability and Illness in Quarantine: Hōjō Tamio and the Experience of Leprosy (Hansen’s Disease) in Modern Japan 

1 PM: Lunch break

2 PM: PANEL 6 – Disability, narrativity and emotional prosthesis (Chair: TBD)

• Marla Carlson (University of Georgia): Blindness and Disgust in Medieval French Farce
• Magdalena Matczak (Nicolaus Copernicus University): Osteobiographies of Disability and Emotions in Medieval Culmen, Poland
• Marit Ronen (Independent scholar): Disgust and Disability, Gatekeeping in Early Medieval England
• Abigail Greaves (University of Nottingham): Impairment, Sadness, and Hagiography in Early Medieval England 

3.30 PM: Coffee break

3.45 PM: Panel 7 – Agency, the disabled self and emotions (Chair: TBD)

• Chayyim Holtkamp (The Citadel): Resistance in a Mental Institution: The South Carolina Lunatic Asylum as a Site of Patient Agency
• Paul Van Trigt (Leiden University): Disabling suffering. Dutch self-advocates and pain (relief) during the 1990s
• Timo Houtekamer (European University Institute): Symptoms or Self-Expressions? The Role of Emotions in Patient Files of People Diagnosed with Schizophrenia in Zurich, 1908-1950

5 PM: Coffee break

5.15 PM: Keynote 2 by Barbara Rosenwein

Thursday, 15 June 2023

10 AM: PANEL 8 – Performing emotions and disability (Chair: TBD)

• Kalina Hadzhikova (Johns Hopkins University): Folly, Performance, and Emotional Regulation in Medieval England.”
• Kirstie Stage (Christ’s College, University of Cambridge): ‘Piss on Pity’: Disabled Activists Challenging Narratives
• Flora Amann (University of Jean Monnet): A Language of Emotions in the Age of Reason. Sign Language, Rationalism and Sensualism in Eighteenth-Century France
• Esme Cleall (University of Sheffield): Dancing for Joy’: Disability and the Affective Connection in British Missionary Writing

11.30 AM: Coffee break

11.45 AM: PANEL 9 – Educational regimes of emotions and disability (Chair: TBD)

• Shilpaa Anand (BITS Pilani, Hyderabad Campus): Being Sentimental, Being Enraged: Historicizing the Symbolism of Ekalavya’s Amputation
• Gábor Bradács (Independent scholar): Claudi quoque et muti, surdique et paralitici a suis sunt infirmitatibus liberati. The perception of the disability in the medieval Hungarian hagiography between abhorrence and compassion
• Léo Delaune (University of Strasbourg): Fear of humiliation, desire for humility: shame and physical disability in medieval exempla

1 PM: Lunch break

2 PM: PANEL 10 – Emotional knowledge and disablement (Chair: Sara Scalenghe)

• Hilary Buxton (Kenyon College): Pride and Pity: Performing Emotion in Interwar South Asian Disability Petitions
• Marco Di Giulio (Franklin & Marshall College): Contesting the Politics of British Prosthetic Care: Pain, Nativeness, and the Plight of Palestinian Jewish Amputees in WWII
• Nathanje Dijkstra (Utrecht University): Navigating pain, fatique and misery. A practice-focused analysis of emotional expressions in workers’ disability benefit claims in the Netherlands (1901-1967)
• Elif Küskü (Istanbul Technical University): Feelings of the Orthopedically Disabled: Arm and Leg Prosthesis Petitions in the Ottoman Empire 

3.30 PM: Concluding remarks 

Informations pratiques :

13 Jun 2023 09:30 AM to 15 Jun 2023 04:00 PM
Online via Zoom (Register below to get the Zoom-link)

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