Susan Burch, Professor of American Studies, Middlebury College, will deliver the keynote address at the Society for the Humanities' Spring Fellows' Conference. This year's conference centers on the Society's 2024-25 focal theme of "Silence". Conference presentations will occur throughout the day on Friday, April 25. Please click here for the conference's full program of events. 

Re-Storying Silence: Mad, Deaf and Disability Histories

Friday, April 25, 3:15-4:45 p.m. 

A.D. White House, Guerlac Room 

Free + open to the public. Reception to follow. 
 

This talk centers on life stories of Black deaf people detained at a state mental hospital in North Carolina, and of Native Americans incarcerated at a federal asylum in South Dakota. Burch traces some of the multivalent relationships silence has to institutionalization, institutionalized people, and to their kin on the outside.  Centering on life stories and drawing on critical disability, Mad, and deaf history, she reveals wide-ranging meanings and functions of silences that cross generations and reach into the present day.

Susan Burch's research and teaching interests focus on histories of deaf, disability, Mad, race, ethnicity, Indigeneity, and gender and sexuality. Material culture, oral history, and inclusive design play an important role in her courses. Her latest book, which has recently received the National Women’s Studies Association Alison Piepmeier Book Prize, and the Disability History Association’s Outstanding Book of 2022, Committed: Native Families, Institutionalization, and Remembering (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) centers on peoples’ lived experiences inside and outside the Canton Asylum, a federal psychiatric institution created specifically to detain American Indians. To learn more about Burch and her research, click here. 

This event will feature American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation.

Please contact adwhitehouse@cornell.edu for accommodations.