IMPORTANT
Visualizing Deafness
Language Manuals & Manual Languages in Premodern Archives
Thursday, October 18, 2018 · 4 PM - 5 PM
MEMS Colloquium Lecture
Jonathan Hsy, Associate Professor of English, George Washington University
Building
on research on manual-kinetic communication in medieval and early
modern Europe, this presentation suggests possibilities for a prehistory
of Deaf culture prior to the development of fully expressive sign
languages. How did premodern people express the value of deafness as a
physical condition and cultural practice? In what way can lived
experience of deafness in the historical past reshape contemporary
(often politicized) understandings of cultural, linguistic, or ethnic
identity?
An American Sign Language Interpreter will be present.
A reception will follow the program.
Bio: Jonathan Hsy
is Associate Professor of English at George Washington University and
founding co-director of the GW Digital Humanities Institute. His
interests integrate medieval literature, media studies, disability
history, and critical theory. Author of Trading Tongues: Merchants,
Multilingualism, and Medieval Literature (2013), he is the co-editor of
the medieval volume of Bloomsbury’s Cultural History of Disability and
co-director of the Global Chaucers project. Hsy’s articles on digital
humanities and disability have appeared in PMLA, postmedieval, New
Medieval Literatures, Accessus, Journal of Bioethical Inquiry,
and Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature. His current book
project, tentatively titled, The Unfamiliar Body: Disability,
Autobiography, and Historical Difference, explores life writing by
medieval authors who self-identified as blind or deaf.
Sponsored by the Medieval and Early
Modern Studies (MEMS) Program; the Dresher Center for the Humanities;
the English Department; the Visual Arts Department; the Ancient Studies
Department; and Student Disability Services