We are delighted to open the blog to our 2021 Jaipreet Virdi Fellow in Disability Studies, Rachael Gillibrand
Hello there, my name’s Rachael and I’m delighted to introduce myself as the Medical Heritage Library’s Jaipreet Virdi 2021 Fellow in Disability Studies. As a Fellow, I will be working with the Medical Heritage Library to curate new collections of primary sources on the topic of ‘Disability and Technology’. These will be made available online, so keep an eye out for them appearing over the summer months!
The ‘Disability and Technology’ focus of this fellowship is very closely connected to my personal research interests. In September 2020, I completed my PhD at the University of Leeds. My thesis, entitled The Material Culture of Physical Impairment: Assistive Technology in Northern Europe, c. 1400–c. 1600, considered the construction, use, and popular perceptions of a variety of assistive technologies, and thought about the ways in which current debates in the fields of transhumanism and cyborg theory could be applied to questions of historical dis/ability, technology, and the body.
Drawing upon this research, I have a number of published and forthcoming book chapters, including:
- ‘Military Masculinity and Mechanised Prostheses: The Use of Assistive Technologies in Sixteenth Century Warfare’, in Alan Murray, James Titterton (eds.), The Material Culture of Medieval War (Leiden: Brill) – expected 2021
- ‘Sight and Sanctity: Images of Saints Wearing Spectacles in Later Medieval Visual Culture’, in Stephanie Grace-Petinos, Leah Pope Parker, Alicia Spencer-Hall (eds.), Disability and Sanctity in the Middle Ages, vol. 2 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press) – expected 2021
- ‘The Smithfield Decretals (c.1340)’, in Cameron Hunt-McNabb (ed.), The Medieval Disability Sourcebook (New York: Punctum Press, 2020)
If you’d like a taste of my research, I recently published an article in EPOCH magazine about my favourite knight and his use of a prosthetic arm (you can find that here: https://www.epoch-magazine.com/post/to-fight-as-well-as-anyone-else-medieval-knights-and-mechanised-prosthesesby)
Since completing my PhD, I have been employed as a Lecturer of Medieval History and Heritage at Aberystwyth University in Wales. In this position, I teach several research-led modules including ‘Dread and Despair? Living with Disability in the Middle Ages’. This module encourages students to draw upon an interdisciplinary body of primary source materials to challenge the popular notion that the historical experience of disability was one of ‘dread and despair’. By thinking critically about the validity of the ‘dark ages’ myth, my students and I enjoy more nuanced conversations about historical understandings of health, dis/ability, and the body.
However, despite the pre-modern focus of my research and teaching content, I am fascinated by the use and development of disability technology more broadly. As such, I hope this fellowship will unearth some fascinating material from the medieval through to the modern. If you would like to talk to me about my fellowship or my research more broadly, you can find me on Twitter @r_gillibrand or via email at rag32@aber.ac.uk.
I look forward to sharing my findings with you over the coming months!