Literary Crip Time: New Narrative Rhythms

The concept of crip time circulates widely in disability studies and disability advocacy communities. This panel attends to the way that thinking with the concept of crip time offers compelling provocations for the study of literature, especially narrative temporality and formal qualities of fictional texts. 

Panelists:

• Crystal Yin Lie (Cal State Long Beach)
• Drew McEwan (TMU)
• Adrianna Michell (UofT)
• Sami Schalk (UW Madison)

Moderator:

• Katherine Williams (UofT)

Host:

• Aparna Nair (UTSC) 

Full Bios

Moderator: Dr. Katherine Williams is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto. Her work has appeared in English Literary History, English Studies, Disability Studies Quarterly, Early Theatre, Shakespeare Bulletin, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and several edited collections. She edited Chapman, Jonson, and Marston’s 1605 play Eastward Ho for The Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama (2020) and is currently editing Shakespeare’s King Henry IV, Part 2 (Cambridge). Her monograph, Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theater (Cornell University Press, 2021), was shortlisted for the ASTR Barnard Hewitt Award and the Shakespeare’s Globe Book Award, and received Honorable Mentions for the MRDS David Bevington Award and the ATHE Outstanding Book Award. With Gregg Mozgala and Kim Weild, she is Co-Artistic Lead of The Apothetae residency at The Public Theater (NYC), which foregrounds the virtuosity of Deaf and disabled artists and theater-makers through Shakespeare’s plays.

Host: Aparna Nair is Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto Scarborough, at the Department for Health and Society/Center for Global Disability Studies. From 2015 to the end of 2022, she worked as Assistant Professor at the University of Oklahoma-Norman, in the History of Science department. Her upcoming book “Fungible Bodies” (2024) with the University of Illinois Press’ Disability Histories examines the relationship between disability and colonialism in British India. Professor Nair also works on the histories of technologies for disabled people (vision aids, hearing aids, prosthetics, etc); the histories of vaccination and quarantine in India; the material histories of vaccination (specifically the history of the vaccination certificate); and also work on the changing representations of disability and difference in popular culture. She also builds exhibits as part of her public history/humanities work.

Panelists: Dr. Drew McEwan is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Mellon Foundation-funded Communities of Care project at the University at Buffalo. She researches and writes on rhetorical and cultural representations of madness, disability, and queerness from a position of lived experience. Her academic work has appeared in The Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, and the anthology Literatures of Madness: Disability Studies and Mental Health. She is also the author of the poetry collections Repeater, If Pressed, and Tours, Variously (forthcoming, 2025).

Adrianna Michell is a PhD candidate in the department of English at the University of Toronto and a Research Assistant Fellow with the Centre for Global Disability Studies. Her research concerns disability, Madness, the environment, and temporality in contemporary American and Canadian fiction. She previously completed her BA in English & Cultural Studies and MA in Cultural Studies and Critical Theory at McMaster University. Her publications include work in Media, Culture & Society and the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies (forthcoming). 

Dr. Sami Schalk is a professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on disability, race and gender in contemporary American literature and culture. She is the author of Bodyminds Reimagined (2018) and Black Disability Politics (2022), both available free open access from Duke University Press.

Crystal Yin Lie recently received her Ph.D. in English Language & Literature with a graduate certificate in Science, Technology and Society from the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor. Her research and teaching are animated by interdisciplinary interests in literary and life writing studies, disability studies, health humanities, and visual culture. Crystal is a co-founder of the University of Michigan Disability Studies Group, a campus-wide interdisciplinary workshop, and has also organized numerous events for the University of Michigan Initiative on Disability Studies. She is a former Rackham Humanities Research Fellow, National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute Scholar for College and University Teachers, and Outward Bound non-profit outdoor educator. Her most recent scholarship can be found in The Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Graphic Medicine.org, Disability Experiences, and Age, Culture, Humanities. Currently, she is co-editing a manuscript on the legacy of late disability studies scholar (and former mentor) Tobin Siebers, and working on two articles: one on temporality, chronic illness, and comics, and another on Alzheimer’s and the Armenian Genocide in a graphic memoir by Dana Walrath, which will appear in Biography’s special issue on “Graphic Medicine.” Crystal’s research presentation draws from her dissertation, titled Entangled Stories: Reimagining Dementia, History, and Narrative in Contemporary Literature and Life Writing, which was recently nominated for a ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award.