At Dickinson, academic departments include Africana Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Classical Studies, and Medieval Studies. But what about Disability Studies? The somewhat new field was first recognized in academia in around the 1980s, and the discussion of its concept of normality is the subject of a $350,000 grant awarded to the Dickinson humanities departments by Mellon Higher Learning. The project is titled “Beyond the New Normal,” using language from the COVID-19 pandemic to analyze what was often taken for granted before that crisis. 

This new project is driven by the combination of the reality of disability and its depiction in literature. Attempts to create a “new normal” have raised questions in the public consciousness about how good the old normal was. 

This creates a tension “between the hope for more inclusive and just forms of labor, study, and social and political access, on the one hand, and resignation to straitened circumstances and increased violence and intolerance on the other,” according to Professor Claire Seiler, Associate Professor of English, and Professor Alyssa DeBlasio, Associate Professor of Russian and John B. Parsons Chair in the Liberal Arts & Sciences. Their project wants to reinstate the role of literature in the answering of these questions. 

The diversity present in Dickinson’s literary curriculum is perfectly poised to tackle these questions and to work with the Mellon Foundation, who emphasized the connection between social justice and literature. “We want to administer this grant in the opposite way we got it,” said Seiler. She and DeBlasio want to distribute the grant to as many departments as they can, funding faculty research, new courses and community engagement, including a collaboration with the US Army War College. 

However, Disability Studies will not become a new course of study offered. Instead it will be “infuse[d] into our campus intellectual culture and our local community in central Pennsylvania.” So what should students expect? Public talks on “The Novel and the Normal,” “The Body at War” and new, team-taught courses on the subject at sophomore and senior-seminar levels, to help inform students of literature about the topic.