Heidi Brayman (UCR), Soundproof: Deafness, Muteness, and Alterabilities in Early Modern England

Maison de la recherche Sorbonne nouvelle, 4 rue des Irlandais (75005), salle du conseil (5.30pm-7pm)

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A religious, legal, and literary history of deafness and muteness, Soundproof considers a range of vocal silences and alternative modes of communication in early modern England, exploring the status and meaning of deafness and muteness as disability, practice, ploy, and convention in households, theaters, abbeys, and courts of law. The project engages the deeply complicated forms of representing disability in the early modern period – the moment, for example, when the assumption that the congenitally deaf are inevitably mute was at last called into question. As the pun in the title suggests, the book is also concerned with issues of evidence and proof, and it seeks to make a methodological and theoretical intervention into our understanding of historical and literary standards of evidence and argument.

Heidi Brayman is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. Her first monograph, Reading Material, is a study of print, gender and literacy in early modern England; she has also co-edited three volumes, Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800; Teaching Early Modern English Literature from the Archives; and Books in History, Books as History: New Intersections of the Material Text. A former Trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America, she turns in her current book project to a more explicit engagement with English theatrical practice and performance, along with religious history, devotional lyric, and critical disability studies.

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