This panel puts forward premodern disability as enhancement, surplus, or even reward, drawing from the concept of “disability gain,” coined by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (Fox, Krings, Vierke, 2019), to reformulate disability as gain, instead of loss, or as a resource. The concept is based on H-Dirksen Bauman and Joseph Murray’s concept of “Deaf gain,” which approaches Deafness as a benefit that expands social, cultural, intellectual, and creative fields (2014). While this concept has yet to be applied to premodern disability, reading disability in premodern texts through the lens of “disability gain” may allow the modern scholar to reframe and discuss the premodern body outside of ethnocentric systems.

To transgress is to exceed, violate, or infringe upon a law, rule, or convention. When transgression occurs, it often manifests as violence — crime, terrorism, bodily mutilation, etc. — because these are obvious signifiers that a significant legal, social, or moral boundary has been crossed. But the mechanism of transgression, which is always present in society and always necessary for its evolution, can also take subtler forms, manifesting as disgust or abjection (Julia Kristeva), sexuality or eroticism (Georges Bataille), laughter or carnival (Mikhail Bakhtin), etc.

The Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) Convention will be held in Boston March 7-10 2024.

"The people in those books never lived!" It's an ironic observation from Captain Beatty, which he uses to justify the burning of books in Fahrenheit 451. Ray Bradbury's dystopian novel turned seventy years old in 2023, yet many of the thematic elements persist today. While books are not being burned (at least not yet), book banning has certainly surged over the past few years. Indeed, the heated political climate in the United States has called for many books to be pulled from K-12 curricula, books that are oftentimes by and about people of color and LGBTQ+ folks. 

ACLA Annual Meeting: Montréal, March 14-17 2024

The act of literary reading implies a commitment to the text, which means making ourselves available and open to its potential and consequences. Indeed, many texts require us to devote careful attention to them and to adopt a ‘vulnerable reading’ stance even though they escape our horizon of meaning. What are difficult texts and how can they be felt as such?

Please consider submitting a proposal for the following panel proposal for the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies (INCS) 2024 Conference, to be held March 21-24 in Cincinnati, OH: