Erin Russell is an external PhD candidate at ASCA, University of Amsterdam. While Hilda Doolittle’s (hereafter H.D.) feminist and queer themes constitute terrain that has been well examined, this project called “Fissured” body/minds: Disability theory and a discourse of deformity in H.D, will engage the criticism done thus far by “cripping the reading” as per queer disability theorist Robert McRuer’s formulation. A recurring metaphor in H.D.’s oeuvre is of bodies that are cut, deformed, hulled out, conflated, hybridized, and dismembered. This dissertation asks the question: how might her handling of these tropes be contextualized against the modernist/early postmodern backdrop in which she worked? The goal of this disability studies research project is one of shedding new light on how the modernists conceived of questions of embodiment and impairment more widely though an examination of H.D., herself an icon of queer and feminist modernism. The project is supervised by prof. dr. Carrol Clarkson (UVA) and dr. Rudolph Glitz (UVA).
