Farr: “Oralism and the Deafened Literary Sensibilities of Late Eighteenth-Century Britain”

Exploration of two contradictory ideas about deafness in later eighteenth-century Britain. The first of these entails the oralist education of deaf children, such as what Thomas Braidwood practiced at the academy he established in 1760 in Edinburgh (the first such school in Britain). The second idea involves the literature of the same period which is characterized by an emphasis on characters’ sensibility, or non-speaking forms of embodied communication meant to convey interiority via facial expression, hand movement, gesture, and other deaf and crip linguistic domains. In all, the contradiction between oralism and literary sensibility illuminates an overlooked facet of deaf cultural history–that even as spoken fluency was becoming normalized in England, deaf epistemologies still figured prominently, disrupting audism and indicating a linguistic capaciousness that continues to resonate today.

Krentz: "Anthologizing ASL Literature"

For the field of American literary deaf studies to move forward, we need a comprehensive digital version of an ASL literature anthology, but how that would work is far from straight forward. This presentation will think through some of the issues about accomplishing that.

Lee: “Cultivating an Authentic, Collaborative Approach to Publishing Deaf Narrative and Literature”

Reflection on the ways that Gallaudet University Press is working to nourish and elevate the work of deaf scholars and writers. A central component of our mission is engaging with various stakeholders across our publishing program in ways that are authentic, collaborative, and ethical. I will consider the challenges and important opportunities that arise as publishers and allies of deaf communities and deaf people worldwide.

Harmon: "Romancing the Eugenists: Early 20th Century Deaf Creative Writers on Eugenics"

In Memoir Upon the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race (1883), Alexander Graham Bell proposed several preventative eugenic measures to reduce the transmission of deafness, including oralism–or the pedagogical approach for the exclusive teaching of speech and lipreading–and proposals for the reduction of deaf-deaf intermarriage through social, educational, and (potentially) legislative levers. Because marriage autonomy was often conflated with labor and class rather than treated as one of several interwoven strategies in eugenic thinking, editorial writing in Deaf community publications tended to emphasize fitness and employability rather than addressing the ways in which rising nativist beliefs merged with eugenics in the postbellum era on into early 20th century America. A closer look at Deaf creative publications of the era reveals the deployment of a complex set of discursive strategies. Eugenics is ambitious, they warned, but stories of “true love and sympathy” assuaged community fears and reiterated counterarguments intended to sway eugenicists. In their fiction, Deaf creative writers of this era–namely Douglas Tilden, Hypatia Boyd, Guie Deliglio, and Howard Terry– complicated, reinscribed, and countered eugenic ideologies.

Kolb: "Adapting Embodied Communication Across Media"

Written narrative by or about deaf people tends to revolve around the possibilities as well as the complications of embodied forms of communication, which can be challenging to convey in textual space and through the printed page. I will briefly consider one of my experiences with adapting an original written essay into a short multimedia film project — describing some of the visual and rhetorical decisions that accompanied my collaborations with a filmmaking team on the award-winning short “Can You Read My Lips?” after writing and publishing the creative nonfiction piece, “Seeing at the Speed of Sound.” I will close by considering how deaf narrative and literature naturally lend themselves to more such cross-media interchanges and artistic collaborations.

Novič: "Found in Translation: Cultivating New Cross- and Multimodal Writings in Liminal Spaces"

Translation between any two languages requires a translator to prioritize certain qualities of an original work for preservation, leaving others as secondary concerns or sometimes abandoning them completely. Generally this process is thought of as deficit-based: portions of the original text’s beauty and meaning are bound to be lost via this imperfect process. However, Deaf writers have long been contending with an extreme version of translation's questions—across languages and dimensions—and have in response created a variety of hybrid multimodal solutions for the “problems” presented. This presentation will examine several methodologies used by D/HH creators, including my own system of visual dialogue tags in the novel True Biz. I will close by considering takeaways regarding the generative nature of translation as a whole, between all languages.