Early Modern Race and Disability: Intersections and Beyond

In recent years, the study of early modern literature and culture has become increasingly informed by the insights of critical race studies; in a parallel development, scholars are also showing a growing commitment to exploring disability in the early modern world. This conversation puts premodern critical race studies and early modern disability studies in conversation — to explore not only the specific intersections between race and disability, but also to theorize how the two fields’ shared commitment to interrogating forms of early modern difference might be mutually-informing more broadly.

Speakers

Bridger M. Bartlett (Swansea University)

Bridger M. Bartlett received their PhD in English from the University of Mississippi in 2025 and is currently a postdoctoral research associate with the Early Modern Neurodivergence Project at Swansea University. Their recently completed monograph manuscript, Grace and Rude Will: Neurodiversity and Racial Formation in Early Modern English Literature, is currently under review with a major press, and the collection they have coedited with Laura Seymour and Bradley J. Irish, Neurodiversity and Early Modern English Literature, is forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press. There work has also appeared in ELH and JEMCS.

Deyasini Dasgupta (Washington State University)

Deyasini (Deya) Dasgupta is an assistant professor of English at Washington State University. She is presently working on her first monograph on early modern monstrosity, interrogating the feelings evoked by alterity through the lens of premodern critical race, disability, and trans studies. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies, the Shakespearean International Yearbook, the Oxford Handbook of Disabilities and Literature in English, Neurodiversity in Early Modern Britain, and Early Modern Trans Drama, amongst others. 

Penelope Geng (Macalester College)

Penelope Geng is an associate professor of English specializing in early modern literature, Shakespeare, law and literature, religion, and disability. Her book Communal Justice in Shakespeare’s England: Drama, Law, and Emotion (2021) argues for the vital work of drama in preserving a culture of participatory justice, communal care, and lay magistracy at a time when the law was becoming professionalized. Her next project, provisionally titled Disabled by Law traces the legacy of seventeenth-century property law on modern notions of able-bodied citizenship—and the surprising ways that ideology was (and continues to be) contested by the literary imagination. She is the co-founder of Uncommon Bodies, a Twin Cities-based research workshop devoted to sharing knowledge about disability theory, aesthetics, and pedagogy. 

Jennifer Park (University of Glasgow)

Jennifer Park is  a lecturer in early modern English at the University of Glasgow. Her research intersects critical race, the histories of science and medicine, ecocriticism, new materialisms, and histories of gender and a/sexualities to interrogate power, violence, and exploitation in early modern English literature. Her work has been published in Renaissance and Reformation, Studies in Philology, Performance Matters, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching, Shakespeare Quarterly, The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race, and most recently in PMLA in collaboration with Hillary Eklund, Debapriya Sarkar, and Ayanna Thompson. She is working on a book project that examines how Shakespeare and his contemporaries deployed the language and epistemologies of early modern recipes to craft narratives of racial formation and colonialist justification in English drama. 

Katherine Williams (University of Toronto) 

Katherine Williams works in and across the fields of early modern English drama, critical disability studies, and theater and performance studies. Her first book, Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theater (Cornell, 2021), shows how disability is a resource for performance and central to emerging conventions of theatrical form in early modern England. As scholar and dramaturg, She maintains an active practice of artistic collaboration focused on access aesthetics. From 2023-25, she was Co-Artistic Lead (Scholar and Dramaturg) of The Apothetae Residency, with Gregg Mozgala and Kim Weild, at The Public Theater (NYC). With collaborators Andrew Morrill, Alexandria Wailes, and Kim Weild, she's currently at work on the SSHRC-funded research project “Shakespeare and ASL Poetics: Translation, Artistry, and Theatrical Possibility.” She is currently completing a book on crip artistry in contemporary productions entitled Shakespeare and the Dramaturgy of Disability.

Moderated by Bradley J. Irish (Arizona State University)

Bradley J. Irish studies the literature and culture of Renaissance England, with a particular focus on both the history of emotion and the emerging field of early modern neurodiversity studies. He is the author of Emotion and the Tudor Court: Literature, History, and Early Modern Feeling (2018), Shakespeare and Disgust: The History and Science of Early Modern Revulsion (2023), The Universality of Emotion: Perspectives from the Sciences and Humanities (2024), The Rivalrous Renaissance: Envy and Jealousy in Early Modern English Literature (2025), and Literary Neurodiversity Studies: Current and Future Directions (2025). He currently serves as Co-Editor-in-Chief of the interdisciplinary journal Emotion Review. He is also the creator of literaryneurodiversity.org and earlymodernemotion.net.

Webinar link

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