Stay tuned for annotations and additional entries.

Adams, Ellen. “New Light on ‘the Viewer’: Sensing the Parthenon Galleries in the British Museum.” Disability Studies and the Classical Body, edited by Ellen Adams. Routledge, 2021.

Bartlett, Bridget. “Macbeth’s Idiot and Faulkner’s Compsons.” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, vol. 14, no. 2, 2023, pp. 139-142, DOI:https://doi.org/10.18274/bl.v14i2.319.

• Noting that the disability-related meaning of “idiot” was secondary to a class-related meaning at the time Shakespeare wrote of “a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury / Signifying nothing,” Bartlett suggests that the title of William Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury may reflect the novel’s subject matter in ways that have not been widely recognized.

Cachia, Amanda. “Disability Aesthetics: A Pedagogy for Teaching a Revisionist Art History.” Sex, Identity, Aesthetics: The Work of Tobin Siebers and Disability Studies, edited by Jina B. Kim et al., U of Michigan P, 2021, pp. 161–72.

Chace, Jessica. “Diagnostic Medievalism: The Case of Leprosy’s Stigma.” Disability Studies Quarterly, vol. 39, no. 3, 3, Aug. 2019. https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v39i3.6410.

Coker, Lauren. “Masquerading Early Modern Disability: Sexuality, Violence, and the Body (Politic) in Richard III.” Screen Bodies, vol. 3, no. 1, 2018, pp. 98-108.

• Inspired by Katherine Schaap Williams’s reading Richard III’s rhetorical and performative use of disability in Shakespeare’s play, Coker examines how Sir Ian McKellen’s Richard employs masquerade to use disability to his advantage in Richard Loncraine’s 1995 film adaptation. Coker attends to the roles of aggression and sexuality in the film and concludes that “the first half of the film features Richard masquerading ability, while the second half features him masquerading disability.” (abstract)

Davidson, Michael. “The Rage of Caliban: Disabling Bodies in Modernist Aesthetics.” Modernism/modernity, vol. 22, no. 4, 2015, pp. 609-625.

Dennis, Nathan S. “The Aesthetics of Prosthetics: From the Premodern Uncanny to the Postmodern Imaginary.” The Routledge Companion to Art and Disability, edited by Keri Watson, Timothy W. Hiles, Routledge, 2022, pp. 358-384. DOI:10.4324/9781003009986-24.

• From abstract: “…mimetic impulse has dominated prosthetic design theory for the last two hundred years. Recent developments in robotics and medical device technology—aided by the history of art and design—have questioned the necessity of mimesis in artificial body parts by embracing the uncanny and exploring the social and philosophical precepts of what it means to be human. However, these fundamental questions of mimetic prostheses and body augmentation are not novel to modernity. Ancient and medieval societies grappled with the same issues when confronted with disability or nonnormative bodies, and they frequently rejected mimesis as a guiding principle for making the body whole again. Instead, they often pushed the boundaries of bodily agency through a keen awareness of materiality, designing prostheses that subverted the power of the uncanny gaze while embracing the uniqueness of the trans-, meta- or even posthuman body.”

Donnelly, Colleen Elaine. “Re-Visioning Negative Archetypes of Disability and Deformity in Fantasy: Wicked, Maleficent, and Game of Thrones.” Disability Studies Quarterly, vol. 36, no. 4, 4, Dec. 2016. https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v36i4.5313.

Dunn, L.C. (2020). Shakespearean Disability Theatre. In: Dunn, L.C. (eds) Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama. Palgrave Macmillan.

Escolme, Bridget. “Ophelia Confined: Madness and Infantilisation in Some Versions of Hamlet.” Performance, Madness and Psychiatry: Isolated Acts, edited by Anna Harpin and Juliet Foster, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp. 165–86.

Goggins, Sophie. “Displaying the Forgotten Other in Museums: Prostheses at National Museums Scotland.” Disability Studies and the Classical Body, edited by Ellen Adams, Routledge, 2021.

Gottlieb, Christine M. “Radically Accessible Shakespeare: Cripping the Digital Shakespeare Canon through Universal Design and Disability Studies.” Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 17, no. 1, 2023.

Graham, Emma-Jayne. “Interactional Sensibilities: Bringing Ancient Disability Studies to Its Archaeological Senses.” Disability Studies and the Classical Body, edited by Ellen Adams. Routledge, 2021.

Helms, Nicholas R. “Seeing Brains: Shakespeare, Autism, and Self-Identification.” Redefining Disability, edited by Paul D. C. Bones et al., Brill, 2022, pp. 152–59. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004512702_026.

Hughes, Bill. “Disabled People as Counterfeit Citizens: The Politics of Resentment Past and Present.” Disability & Society, vol. 30, no. 7, Aug. 2015, pp. 991–1004. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2015.1066664.

King, Helen. “A History of Our Own?: Using Classics in Disability Histories.” Disability Studies and the Classical Body, edited by Ellen Adams. Routledge, 2021.

Kostihová, Marcela. “Richard Recast: Renaissance Disability in a Postcommunist Culture.” Recovering Disability in Early Modern England. Ohio State UP, 2013.

Leonard, Kendra P. “Music for Olivier’s Richard III: Cinematic Scoring for the Early Modern Monstrous.” The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies. Edited by Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, et al. Oxford U P, 2015.

Long, K.P. (2019). From Monstrosity to Postnormality: Montaigne, Canguilhem, Foucault. In: Godden, R., Mittman, A. (eds) Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman in the Medieval and Early Modern World. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan.

Lubet, Alex, and Ingrid C. Hofmann. “Classical Music, Disability, & Film: A Pedagogical Script.” Disability Studies Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 1, 2006.

Maierhofer, Waltraud. “Disability as Opportunity in Alissa Walser’s Novel about the Blind Maria Theresia Paradis,” Disability in German-Speaking Europe: History, Memory, Culture, edited by Linda Leskau, Tanja Nusser, Katherine Sorrels. Boydell & Brewer, 2022, pp. 219-240, DOI:https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv25m8dbt.14.

McCarthy, Grace. Shakespearean Drama, Disability, and the Filmic Stare. Taylor and Francis, 2021, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003163374.

McNabb, Cameron Hunt. “Dramatic Prosthesis: Embodying Disability in Lear.” Disability Studies Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 304, 2022, n.p. https://dsq-sds.org/index.php/dsq/article/view/8274/7866.

• Excerpt: “I propose that drama requires its own theoretical concepts for analyzing disability beyond what literary disability studies currently offers. Reading dramatic depictions of disability as literary texts, rather than embodied performances, flattens the semiotic work that they do; however, attending to the embodiment staging disability demands illuminates avenues for shared embodied knowledge within the audience. I read Lear as a particularly apt case study. Disability forms a central theme of Lear and, as Christine M. Gottlieb points out, appears in every plot line. … But in many ways, scholars have under-theorized these depictions of disability in the play” (n.p.).

Metzler, Irina. “Then and Now: Canon Law on Disabilities.” Disability in Antiquity, edited by Christian Laes, Routledge, 2016, pp. 471 – 483.

• Abstract: “In simplest terms, canon law forbids the ordination of ‘disabled’ men to the priesthood. It is worth pointing out that the issue of impaired persons in holy orders is still not satisfactorily resolved in the modern Catholic Church. In 1995 the Vatican ‘provoked fury by issuing a decree banning men who suffer from an allergy to gluten from becoming priests’ (Bunting 1995). The Vatican insisted on communion wafers containing gluten as the only suitable kind of wafers; gluten can trigger the debilitating coeliac disease. This episode highlights the cultural and socio-economic consequences of what happens when impairments (the underlying medical phenomenon) are loaded with disabilities (the imposition of cultural construction).”

O’Reilly, Kaite, and Phillip Zarrilli. “An Irreverent Richard III Redux: [Re]Cripping the Crip.” Playfulness in Shakespearean Adaptations, edited by Marina Gerzic and Aidan Norrie. Routledge, 2020.

Olive, S. (2020). “This Is Miching Mallecho. It Means Mischief”: Problematizing Representations of Actors with Down’s Syndrome in Growing Up Down’s. In: Dunn, L.C. (eds) Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama. Palgrave Macmillan.

Ott, Katherine. “Collective Bodies: What Museums Do for Disability Studies.” In Re-Presenting Disability: Activism and Agency in the Museum, edited by Richard Sandell, Jocelyn Dodd, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, 269–79. Routledge, 2010.

Peghinelli, Andrea. “‘And Thus I Clothe My Naked Villainy’: Richard III and the Deformed Body as Rhetorical Camouflage in Thomas Ostermeier’s Production.” Shakespeare Bulletin: The Journal of Early Modern Drama in Performance, vol. 39, no. 1, 2021, pp. 93–107. DOI: 10.1353/shb.2021.0014.

Shaughnessy, Robert. “Shakespeare, Performance and Neurodiversity: Bottom’s Dream.” Shakespeare, Education and Pedagogy: Representations, Interactions and Adaptations, edited by Jenny Stevens and Pamela Bickley, pp. 120 – 128. Routledge, 2023.

Stahl, Devan. “Why Medicine Needs a Theology of Monstrosity.” The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, vol. 47, no. 5, 2022, pp. 612-624. DOI:10.1093/jmp/jhac020.

• From abstract: “This article describes the debates that took place in the early modern period concerning the origins of monstrous births and examines how they might be relevant to our understanding of disability today. I begin with the central questions that accompanied the birth of conjoined twins in the early 17th century as well as the theological origins of those questions. I then show the shifts that occurred in philosophical debate in the 18th century, which reveal the changing understanding of God’s interaction with creation, as well as the burgeoning medical responses to monstrous births. By reexamining these earlier debates, I claim some of the earlier questions posed by philosophers and theologians have been neglected but remain relevant in bioethics debates concerning how best to consider and treat newborns with certain disabilities.”