Elizabeth J. Donaldson, professor of English and director of the Medical Humanities minor program at the New York Institute of Technology, will discuss the field of feminist disability studies and her research on madness and mental illness in literary texts. One focus of her talk will be the life and writing of Shulamith Firestone, who published the bestselling feminist manifesto The Dialectic of Sex in 1970 and who was later diagnosed with schizophrenia.

This event is open to WST Learning Community students and guests. Guests should RSVP at wst.lrn.c@gmail.com

From https://www.nyit.edu/bio/edonalds: Elizabeth J. Donaldson is professor of English at NYIT, where she teaches courses in bioethics and American literature and directs the minor in Medical Humanities. She has published essays on LSD-inspired disability-immersion experiences of schizophrenia; mental illness in film; antipsychiatry in Lauren Slater’s memoirs; and physiognomy and madness in Jane Eyre. She chaired the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession, and she is a Fellow in The Future of Disability Studies group at Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Social Difference. She is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disabilities Studies and co-editor (with Catherine J. Prendergast) of the special issue, “Emotion and Disability” (2011). She co-edited the essay collection The Madwoman and the Blindman: Jane Eyre, Discourse, Disability (Ohio State University Press, 2012) and currently co-edits the Palgrave Macmillan book series Literary Disability Studies with David Bolt and Julia Miele Rodas. She edited a collection of essays, Literatures of Madness: Disability Studies and Mental Health (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), and is currently working on a monograph which focuses on psychiatry and American literature.