Announcement of doctoral theses

Crip Time in Fin-de-siècle Spain examines how turn-of-the-twentieth-century authors used representations of disability to engage in urgent political questions about population control and the rights of individuals in the face of increasing medical intervention. Scholarship from scientific and economic disciplines of the time shaped expectations for health around ideas of national progress. The inability to satisfy work schedules and heteronormative life milestones simultaneously became threats to social progress and markers of disability. This project demonstrates that literary depictions of disability questioned medical and political discourses, while exploring the precarity of being healthy/able-bodied at a historical moment in which health and ability were defined in continuously narrowing terms.