“The body as home, but only if it is understood that bodies are never singular, but rather haunted, strengthened, underscored by countless other bodies.” — Eli Clare 

This course is centered around how we understand and talk about disability. How do writers conceptualize and articulate experiences of disability and chronic illness and what does this reveal about our culture, our bodies and ourselves? We will explore, interrogate and challenge what it means to be “normal/abnormal,” “healthy/sick,” a “doctor/patient,” and “cured/cared for” in a variety of texts across time, from nineteenth-century essays, to twentieth-century journals to contemporary graphic memoirs. This course invites you to consider how representations of the body intersect with historical, cultural and contemporary conceptions of medicine, race, religion, class, gender and/or sexuality.

In this course, you will be asked to sharpen your ability to question and analyze a text, to argue a legitimate claim thoughtfully, and to perform focused research. This class demands several hours of academic reading per week and a significant amount of formal and informal writing, both of which contribute to at least one-third of your final grade. The course is designed to challenge you so that you can not only improve with the mechanics of writing, but so that you push yourself to articulate your opinions with more specificity and complexity. Over this next semester, this class will help give you the tools you need to hone your reading, researching, analytical, and writing skills so that you may emerge a better and more confident writer and thinker than you were at the beginning of the semester. Most importantly, you will enhance your ability to write, think, and speak clearly by crafting a research-based project from which you will develop and defend your own argument about a topic that interests you.

Contact Details 

Professor: Professor Katharine Williams

Email: [email protected]

Office Hours: Zoom link tbd