Here are some texts referred to in the exhibition, as well as featured items which we regard as especially useful important for the field of disability history. Where possible, we have included a link to the item in the Library catalogue.

Featured books

Jenifer L. Barclay, The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race and Gender in Antebellum America, (Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2021)

This book discusses disability in relation to slavery and constructions of race and gender in the pre-Civil War, U.S. South.

Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches you and you fall down: A Hmong child, her American doctors, and the collision of two cultures (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012) (available as a physical item only)

This book is an accessible read about a Hmong girl who suffers with seizures. It focuses on the battle between her parents and western medicines; both having different ideas as to the causes and treatments of Lia’s seizures. The book puts into perspective how even in the same historical moment, explanations of illness or disability can differ vastly across cultures.

Claire Shaw, Deaf in the USSR: marginality, community, and Soviet identity, 1917-1991 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017) (library link here)

Written by Warwick's very own Dr Claire Shaw, this book makes a major intervention into Soviet disability history, charting how the state socialist system interacted with activism by Deaf citizens.

Chris Eagle, Dysfluencies: on speech disorders in modern literature (London: Bloomsbury, 2014)

Exploring the much neglected world of speech disorders as forms of disability, Eagle seeks to move beyond analysing literary representations of these as mere 'metaphors' and instead to situate the texts in their historical contexts and the medical knowledges available to their authors. These include Marcel Proust (himself a failed medical student) and covers both the nineteenth century, First World War shellshock and contemporary representations of Tourette's.

Further resources

Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: disability, Deafness and the body  (London: Verso, 1995)

Coreen McGuire, Measuring Difference, Numbering Normal: setting the standards for disability in the interwar period  (Manchester: MUP, 2020)

Mike Oliver, The Politics of Disablement (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1990) [plus several subsequent editions]

Michael Rembis, Catherine Kudlick and Kim E. Nielsen (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Disability History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018)

David M. Turner and Kevin Stagg (eds), Social Histories of Disability and Deformity  (New York: Routledge, 2006)

Image description: Cover of Anne Fadiman's book. The title appears in red and black text, with a sketch of a Hmong child in a traditional headdress (yellow, red and dark blue with beads) below it. The background is a plain cream colour.

Image description: Cover of Jenifer L. Barclay's book. The title appears in green and white text against a plain, dark blue background. In the lower left-hand quadrant, there is an image of the head of an African American girl in the style of an oil painting. She is in profile facing to the right with two green butterflies against her cheek.