"Disability Poetics Before Disability Poetics?" a Lecture by Travis Chi Wing Lau

This talk puts into conversation contemporary disability theory with eighteenth-century poetry written by and about disabled people to consider how eighteenth-century writing theorized disability poetics well before the formation of disability as a politicized identity. Through examinations of poems by both canonical writers like Alexander Pope, John Wilmot, and Mary Wortley Montagu alongside those of understudied writers like Mary Jones, Mary Leapor, and Priscilla Pointon, this lecture recovers how writers in the long eighteenth century articulated a crip grammar for deformity and incapacity through poetic form. How did eighteenth-century writers reimagine the possibilities of the body in the face of increasing pathology and medicalization of illness and disability? How did eighteenth-century disability poetics intervene in the public discourse surrounding disabled people or even reinforce their stigmatization?

Travis Chi Wing Lau (he/him/his) is Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College.His research and teaching focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture, health humanities, and disability studies. Alongside his scholarship, Lau frequently writes for venues of public scholarship like Synapsis: A Journal of Health Humanities, Public Books, Lapham’s Quarterly, and The Los Angeles Review of Books.His poetry has appeared in Wordgathering, Glass, South Carolina Review, Foglifter, and Hypertext, as well as in three chapbooks, The Bone Setter (Damaged Goods Press,2019), Paring (Finishing Line Press, 2020), and Vagaries (ForkTine Press, 2022). [travisclau.com]

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