Category: Research

The writer and biblical scholar John Kitto (1804-1854) had a complicated relationship with his deafness. Born hearing, he was deafened from a fall at the age of twelve. The accident was traumatic, and, his hearing loss signified a major rupture in his identity and turning point in this life. He worked for the Church Missionary… Continue Reading Kitto’s Conundrum: Disability, Writing And Identity 

Confinement has always had a certain Romantic quality in the public imagination. Or perhaps Gothic. Whether fictional, as in Rochester’s first wife in Jane Eyre, semi-fictional, as with the “Man in the Iron Mask,” or factual – think of the depredations of Bedlam asylum – the threat of confinement, being forcefully restrained in a single… Continue Reading Restraining Confinement in Early America