Skip to main content

Julia Miele Rodas

City University of New York, English, Faculty Member

Followers

1,803

Following

174

Co-authors

33

Public Views

Julia Miele Rodas is Professor of English at CUNY’s Bronx Community College. A disability studies scholar and a Victorianist, Julia is the author of Autistic Disturbances (University of Michigan Press, 2018), a book theorizing the role of autistic rhetoric and aesthetic in literature, and co-editor of The Madwoman & the Blindman (The Ohio State University Press, 2012), a collection on disability in Jane Eyre. Her writing has also appeared in Victorian Literature & Culture, Dickens Studies Annual, the Victorian Review, the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, Disability Studies Quarterly, the Explicator, and other venues. She is co-editor of a book series on Literary Disability for Palgrave Macmillan. She is currently working on a long-term project exploring the intersection of violence and disability.

less

Daniel D. Hutto

University of Wollongong

University of Missouri - St. Louis

University of Oxford

Kansas State University

Austin Community College

Syracuse University

Armando Marques-Guedes

UNL - New University of Lisbon

Ucla

M. A. Katritzky

The Open University

Manfred Malzahn

United Arab Emirates University

InterestsView All (22)

Uploads

Books by Julia Miele Rodas

The Madwoman and The Blindman: Jane Eyre, Discourse, Disability

by Elizabeth J. Donaldson, Professor David Bolt, Julia Miele Rodas, Martha Stoddard Holmes, and Lennard Davis

The Madwoman and The Blindman: Jane Eyre, Discourse, Disability, 2012

Full text of book: Table of Contents Foreword by Lennard J. Davis ix Introduction · The Ma... more Full text of book:
Table of Contents

Foreword by Lennard J. Davis ix

Introduction · The Madwoman and the Blindman
Julia Miele Rodas, Elizabeth J. Donaldson, and David Bolt 1

Chapter 1 · The Corpus of the Madwoman: Toward a
Feminist Disability Studies Theory of Embodiment and
Mental Illness
Elizabeth J. Donaldson 11

Chapter 2 · The Blindman in the Classic:
Feminisms, Ocularcentrism, and Jane Eyre
David Bolt 32

Chapter 3 · “On the Spectrum”:
Rereading Contact and Affect in Jane Eyre
Julia Miele Rodas 51

Chapter 4 · From India-Rubber Back to Flesh:
A Reevaluation of Male Embodiment in Jane Eyre
Margaret Rose Torrell 71

Chapter 5 · From Custodial Care to Caring Labor:
The Discourse of Who Cares in Jane Eyre
D. Christopher Gabbard 91

Chapter 6 · “I Began to See”:
Biblical Models of Disability in Jane Eyre
Essaka Joshua 111

Chapter 7 · Illness, Disability, and Recognition in Jane Eyre
Susannah B. Mintz 129

Chapter 8 · Visions of Rochester:
Screening Desire and Disability in Jane Eyre
Martha Stoddard Holmes 150

Autistic Disturbances: Theorizing Autism Poetics from the DSM to Robinson Crusoe. Foreword by Melanie Yergeau. University of Michigan Press, 2018.

While research on autism has sometimes focused on special talents or abilities, autism is typical... more

The Madwoman and the Blindman: Jane Eyre, Discourse, Disability

by Professor David Bolt, Susannah B Mintz, Martha Stoddard Holmes, Lennard Davis, Elizabeth J. Donaldson, and Julia Miele Rodas

This breakthrough volume of critical essays on Jane Eyre from a disability perspective provides f... more

The Madwoman and the Blindman: Jane Eyre, Discourse, Disability (co-edited with David Bolt and Elizabeth Donaldson)

This breakthrough volume of critical essays on Jane Eyre from a disability perspective provides f... more This breakthrough volume of critical essays on Jane Eyre from a disability perspective provides fresh insight into Charlotte Brontë’s classic novel from a vantage point that is of growing academic and cultural importance. Contributors include many of the preeminent disability scholars publishing today, including a foreword by Lennard J. Davis.

Though an indisputable classic and a landmark text for critical voices from feminism to Marxism to postcolonialism, until now, Jane Eyre has never yet been fully explored from a disability perspective. Customarily, impairment in the novel has been read unproblematically as loss, an undesired deviance from a condition of regularity vital to stable closure of the marriage plot. In fact, the most visible aspects of disability in the novel have traditionally been understood in rather rudimentary symbolic terms—the blindness of Rochester and the “madness” of Bertha apparently standing in for other aspects of identity. The Madwoman and the Blindman: Jane Eyre, Discourse, Disability resists this traditional reading of disability in the novel. Informed by a variety of perspectives—cultural studies, linguistics, and gender and film studies—the essays in this collection suggest surprising new interpretations, parsing the trope of the Blindman, investigating the embodiment of mental illness, and proposing an autistic identity for Jane Eyre. As the first volume of criticism dedicated to analyzing and theorizing the role of disability in a single literary text, The Madwoman and the Blindman is a model for how disability studies can open new conversation and critical thought within the literary canon.

Book Series by Julia Miele Rodas

Literary Disability Studies (New Palgrave Macmillan Book Series)

by Julia Miele Rodas, Elizabeth J. Donaldson, and Professor David Bolt

""Literary Disability Studies is the first book series dedicated to the exploration of literature... more ""Literary Disability Studies is the first book series dedicated to the exploration of literature and literary topics from a disability studies perspective. Focused on literary content and informed by disability theory, disability research, disability activism, and disability experience, the Palgrave Macmillan series provides a home for a growing body of advanced scholarship exploring the ways in which the literary imagination intersects with historical and contemporary attitudes toward disability. This cutting edge interdisciplinary work will include both monographs and edited collections (as well as focused research that does not fall within traditional monograph length).

The first two books in the series are:

Friedrich, Patricia. The Literary and Linguistic Construction of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: No Ordinary Doubt. 2015.

Foss, Chris, Jonathan W. Gray, and Zach Whalen. Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narratives. 2016.

The series is supported by an editorial board of internationally-recognised literary scholars specialising in disability studies:
• Michael Bérubé, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Literature, Pennsylvania State University.
• G. Thomas Couser, Professor of English Emeritus, Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York.
• Michael Davidson, University of California Distinguished Professor, University of California, San Diego.
• Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Professor of Women’s Studies and English, Emory University, Atlanta.
• Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson, Professor of English Emerita, Miami University, Ohio.

For information about submitting a Literary Disability Studies book proposal, please contact David Bolt ([email protected]), Elizabeth J. Donaldson ([email protected]), and/or Julia Miele Rodas (Julia.Rodas@ bcc.cuny.edu)"

Articles, Chapters by Julia Miele Rodas

Radical Lessons in the Wake of Black Lives Matter

by Julia Miele Rodas and Julio Rodriguez

Radical Teacher: a socialist, feminist, and anti-racist journal on the theory and practice of teaching, 2019

This graphic essay is about an exercise developed for the community college composition classroom... more This graphic essay is about an exercise developed for the community college composition classroom, using words & pictures to make a graphic "response paper." In addition to other benefits, this exercise frees up student thinking, often resulting in compositions that show more insight and intellectual sophistication than conventional essays, a richer understanding that can later be tapped to add greater dimension to conventional expository writing.

“Narrative Architecture and Autistic Voice in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” Disabling Romanticism: Body, Mind, and Text. Ed. Michael Bradshaw. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 169-90. Print.

Rodas addresses rhetorical and narrative interstices of Frankenstein, exploring the ways in which... more Rodas addresses rhetorical and narrative interstices of Frankenstein, exploring the ways in which the visible sutures of the novel defamiliarise intuitive language and social contact, bringing the reader into a complicit relationship with autism. Rodas observes that the creature’s hovel is simultaneously a container for the disposal of rejected creation and a sanctuary that shields the emergent self and allows it the privacy to develop: the space, and the being which inhabits it, constitute a representation of Romantic autism, an extreme of solitary self-ness, the ultimate expression of solitude. While the infamous ‘monster’ evokes the idea of the feral child that has often been associated with autism, however, Rodas proposes that Shelley’s novel provokes a more intimate relationship with autism than audiences might initially realise: the narrative strategies of the text bind the reader into a seemingly paradoxical experience of muteness and verbal precocity, and a correlative hyper-consciousness of boundaries—both rhetorical and social.

Here There Be Monsters: Teaching Disability Studies at CUNY’s Bronx Community College.

Describes approaches, assignments, and philosophy behind teaching disability studies in an urban ... more

YouDescribe: Testing Crowd-sourced Video Description for Service Learning at the City University of New York

This article has a very simple purpose: to review a free, crowd-sourced video description platfor... more This article has a very simple purpose: to review a free, crowd-sourced video description platform called YouDescribe, to discuss its usefulness as an accessibility tool, and to contemplate a number of crucial factors for creating a video description assignment as a service-learning project for a community college composition course. This practical review is followed by a reflection exploring the unexpected pedagogical insights that were an outgrowth of the review process.

How I Wore My Trollope T-Shirt to the Dickens House Museum (And Other Musings of an American Trollopian in England)

Brief comic academic memoir piece regarding a Trollopian's sabbatical travel to England.

"Limited Visibility, or, Confessions of a Satellite." Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture (special issue: “Caring For, Caring With: Pedagogical Responses to Living with Disabled People,” ed. Allison Hobgood) 15.3 (Oct 2015): 493-505. Print.

In March 2013, a New York Times cover story exposing the author's childhood relationship with dis... more In March 2013, a New York Times cover story exposing the author's childhood relationship with disability forced Rodas to confront her usual practice of nondisclosure in the disability studies classroom. This article is both memoir and identity theory, a remembrance of the writer's childhood experience as guide and companion to a blind and spectacularly noticeable sibling, an exploration of the possibilities and politics of ambiguous disability identity, and a meditation on the responsibilities and pitfalls of disability identity politics and practice. Contextualized by theoretical writing about self-disclosure and pedagogy, the article traces the writer's own learning trajectory around public exposure, disability identity, and disability representation, visiting the politics of language, considering how disability insiders should respond to novice thinkers about disability, and contemplating questions of legitimacy, hierarchy, and political territory. While couched in autobiographical terms, at its heart the article explores implicit relationships of power and violence around the naming or claiming of disability identity—violating exposures, colonizing practices, grappling for ownership—and proposes a “satellite” model to figure the way many ostensibly nondisabled people discover and define themselves in relation to the apparent centrality and authenticity of disability.

"Identity." Keywords for Disability Studies. Eds. Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin. New York: New York University Press, 2015. 103-104.

Disability identity has a complex and dynamic history. Viewing disability as a social constructio... more Disability identity has a complex and dynamic history. Viewing disability as a social construction has been a crucial political concept, a mode of resistance to the pejorative constructs of the social majority and received forms of knowledge that insist on disability exclusively as a medical condition or fact of the body. However, disability identity is also increasingly interlaced with other ongoing social, political, and academic explorations and disability scholars and activists, redressing the early limits of critical disability studies, are working within race studies and global studies frameworks to expand and complicate ideas of disability identity.

"PreOccupied." Social Text Online: Periscope (special issue: DSM-CRIP. Eds. Merri Lisa Johnson and Anna Mollow). 24 Oct 2013. Web. 28 Oct 2013.

Social Text Online: Periscope (special issue: DSM-CRIP. Eds. Merri Lisa Johnson and Anna Mollow), Oct 24, 2013

The DSM resonates with autistic logical, linguistic, and cognitive preferences in its taxonomic ... more The DSM resonates with autistic logical, linguistic, and cognitive preferences in its taxonomic practice. However, this ought not to be regarded as deficit; rather, autism’s devotion to taxonomy may be seen as interpretive, curatorial, exploratory, the language of order not laying out the way it is, but serving instead to investigate content relationships.

"Frankenstein's 'Monster': Autism and Articulation in Mary Shelley's Novel and Beyond." BIBLION: OUTSIDERS, The Afterlife of Shelley and Frankenstein. 7 Jun 2012. Web. 3 Jun 2015.

Grounded in Boris Karloff’s 1931 film performance and confirmed by countless other films, comics,... more Grounded in Boris Karloff’s 1931 film performance and confirmed by countless other films, comics, and popular representations, the prevalent sense of Frankenstein’s “monster” is of a being mute or nearly speechless, a grunting creature, who—if he talks at all—does so in disjointed monosyllables. Such a depiction, though, tells less than half the story: the Creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is, in fact, a remarkably eloquent and incisive speaker, capable of measured, intelligent, wholly articulate argument. Why has popular culture largely denied the Creature this reasonable human voice? Drawing on Enlightenment discussions of the so-called Wild Boy of Aveyron and present-day arguments about how autism “speaks,” this short essay suggests that there is an important connection between the ways the Creature is represented and contemporary concerns about the representation and articulation of autism. [This is an abridged version of a talk given at the NYPL in August 2011.]

“Diagnosable: Mothering at the Threshold of Disability” in Disability and Mothering. Disability and Mothering: Liminal Spaces of Embodied Knowledge. Eds. Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson and Jen Cellio. Syracuse Univ Press, 2011. Print. 113-26.

This is an essay about a hotly contested issue in the experience and theory of disability: The qu... more This is an essay about a hotly contested issue in the experience and theory of disability: The question of how to locate, talk about, and live with an ambiguous disability identity. Because many disabilities are not immediately evident, because many are progressive or create erratic episodes of impairment, and because cultural and political considerations factor largely into competing definitions of disability historically and globally, scholars and activists have been keenly attentive to how individuals locate themselves in relation to disability. While I identify with disability identity in broader terms, however, I do not want to reduce myself to a label for the social convenience of my peers. And, while my desire for medical definition offers the possibility of affirmation, it also facilitates a greater threat. For the labeling of disability effectively generates exclusion and misunderstanding, leading to the dismissal of the person as an individual; bias abounds. There are strong competing concerns in this liminal space: unless we self-identify, we participate in the rampant oppression of and discrimination against disability, but I feel stronger and better acting out my resistance from the margin of what Tobin Siebers has called the disability “masquerade” than I do by potentially acting collectively with friends and colleagues who self-identify. My desire to remain in the indefinite, occupying the “diagnosable” space, is not so much an unwillingness to stand up politically as it is a desire to challenge the disciplinary and diagnostic boundaries of the conventional order. For my own sake, certainly, for the sake of my children, but also for the sake of my colleagues, my neighbors, and my fellow parents, I embrace this undisciplined space, rejecting the confinement of diagnosis and thus choosing to challenge the narrowing definition of human “normalcy.”

“On Blindness,” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 3.2 (2009): 115-130. Print. 115-30.

Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, Jan 1, 2009

Inept, inspired, pathetic, entombed, insatiable, or monstrous: the conventions that are ordinaril... more Inept, inspired, pathetic, entombed, insatiable, or monstrous: the conventions that are ordinarily used to represent blind people reveal far more about our culture than they do about the experience of blindness. This speculative essay examines the place of the blind figure in sighted culture, focusing especially on the role of language in shaping popular conceptions of and associations with blindness. Considering such common sayings as ‘blind rage,’ ‘blind alley,’ ‘blind justice,’ and ‘the blind leading the blind,’ the essay contemplates our myriad perceptions and constructions of blindness and blind people.

"social construction," The Encyclopedia of American Disability History. Susan Burch, ed. Paul Longmore, intro. New York, Facts on File, 2009. 837-38. Print.

“‘On the Spectrum’: Rereading Contact and Affect in Jane Eyre,” Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 4.2 (Summer 2008). Web.

ncgsjournal.com

“‘On the Spectrum’: Rereading Contact and Affect in Jane Eyre” engages the early writing of autis... more “‘On the Spectrum’: Rereading Contact and Affect in Jane Eyre” engages the early writing of autism pioneers Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger and considers Jane’s unusual affect and sociality within the context of medical, theoretical, and autobiographical writing on autism, ultimately suggesting that Jane occupies a place on the autistic spectrum. Rodas argues that readers tend to contextualize Jane’s emotional experience, the interiority of her passionate emotional life, her reduced affect, and the concealing of her deeply rooted feelings in terms of cultural history, understanding her extreme self-control and apparent poise as fitting with historically appropriate social conventions. This article points out, however, that because readers experience this self-control from the inside, Jane’s passions are highly visible and her most obvious autistic characteristics, her silence, flattened affect, and remoteness have rarely been noticed or questioned beyond a feminist context. This essay claims that Jane’s aloofness and social idiosyncrasy do not represent a tacit acceptance—as some have argued—of the exploitation and oppression of subject peoples, but point rather to the political significance of solitude. Thus, Jane achieves new political stature, becoming a model for effective resistance to social control, her “private fecundity seeding possibilities for oppressed and marginalized peoples, especially autistic persons,” who reject the punishing demands of “compulsory sociality.”

“A Disability Awareness Poster Contest at Bronx Community College of The City University of New York (CUNY),” Disability Studies Quarterly 28.4 (Fall 2008). Web.

The student art presented here (including detailed verbal descriptions) grows out of a disability... more The student art presented here (including detailed verbal descriptions) grows out of a disability awareness poster contest held at Bronx Community College of the City University of New York in the spring semester of 2008. Including a reproduction of a poster by student Carmen Caraballo, this brief article provides a description of the project and discusses the ways in which it offered enrichment at many levels. Specifically, by involving students, faculty, and administration in its process, the contest successfully supported an expansive awareness mission in a community which does not outwardly embrace visible disability.

“Misappropriations: Hugh Stuart Boyd and the Blindness of Elizabeth Barrett/Browning,” Victorian Review 33.2 (2007): 103-18. Print.

In the spring of 1826, shortly after the publication of Elizabeth Barrett Barrett’s first major p... more In the spring of 1826, shortly after the publication of Elizabeth Barrett Barrett’s first major poem, An Essay on Mind, a scholarly neighbor, Hugh Stuart Boyd, wrote to the young poet to express his admiration and, since they were near neighbors, to suggest the possibility of a visit. A gentleman of independent means, Boyd was a poet-scholar with a prodigious memory but, considered from our present distance, there is little about him that seems extraordinary. It took almost a year to effect the meeting proposed by Boyd in his first letter, but when he and Barrett finally began visiting, the acquaintance seems to have ripened rapidly into friendship. Thus was to begin one of the most important, and one of the most troubling, relationships of Barrett Browning’s life. The forty-five-year-old Boyd and the twenty-year-old Barrett shared an immense love of Classical poetry and the two met frequently to read together, and to discuss literature, politics, and philosophy. Though these meetings seem to have been a real pleasure for the otherwise intellectually-starved Boyd, he was nevertheless careful to maintain proprieties, warning against any intimacy in the relationship. Barrett, however, was frustrated by Boyd’s business-like attitude and longed for something more than a purely intellectual friendship. It seems, in fact, that Barrett came to fall in love with the older, married Boyd.

The Madwoman and The Blindman: Jane Eyre, Discourse, Disability

by Elizabeth J. Donaldson, Professor David Bolt, Julia Miele Rodas, Martha Stoddard Holmes, and Lennard Davis

The Madwoman and The Blindman: Jane Eyre, Discourse, Disability, 2012

Full text of book: Table of Contents Foreword by Lennard J. Davis ix Introduction · The Ma... more Full text of book:
Table of Contents

Foreword by Lennard J. Davis ix

Introduction · The Madwoman and the Blindman
Julia Miele Rodas, Elizabeth J. Donaldson, and David Bolt 1

Chapter 1 · The Corpus of the Madwoman: Toward a
Feminist Disability Studies Theory of Embodiment and
Mental Illness
Elizabeth J. Donaldson 11

Chapter 2 · The Blindman in the Classic:
Feminisms, Ocularcentrism, and Jane Eyre
David Bolt 32

Chapter 3 · “On the Spectrum”:
Rereading Contact and Affect in Jane Eyre
Julia Miele Rodas 51

Chapter 4 · From India-Rubber Back to Flesh:
A Reevaluation of Male Embodiment in Jane Eyre
Margaret Rose Torrell 71

Chapter 5 · From Custodial Care to Caring Labor:
The Discourse of Who Cares in Jane Eyre
D. Christopher Gabbard 91

Chapter 6 · “I Began to See”:
Biblical Models of Disability in Jane Eyre
Essaka Joshua 111

Chapter 7 · Illness, Disability, and Recognition in Jane Eyre
Susannah B. Mintz 129

Chapter 8 · Visions of Rochester:
Screening Desire and Disability in Jane Eyre
Martha Stoddard Holmes 150

Autistic Disturbances: Theorizing Autism Poetics from the DSM to Robinson Crusoe. Foreword by Melanie Yergeau. University of Michigan Press, 2018.

While research on autism has sometimes focused on special talents or abilities, autism is typical... more

The Madwoman and the Blindman: Jane Eyre, Discourse, Disability

by Professor David Bolt, Susannah B Mintz, Martha Stoddard Holmes, Lennard Davis, Elizabeth J. Donaldson, and Julia Miele Rodas

This breakthrough volume of critical essays on Jane Eyre from a disability perspective provides f... more

The Madwoman and the Blindman: Jane Eyre, Discourse, Disability (co-edited with David Bolt and Elizabeth Donaldson)

This breakthrough volume of critical essays on Jane Eyre from a disability perspective provides f... more This breakthrough volume of critical essays on Jane Eyre from a disability perspective provides fresh insight into Charlotte Brontë’s classic novel from a vantage point that is of growing academic and cultural importance. Contributors include many of the preeminent disability scholars publishing today, including a foreword by Lennard J. Davis.

Though an indisputable classic and a landmark text for critical voices from feminism to Marxism to postcolonialism, until now, Jane Eyre has never yet been fully explored from a disability perspective. Customarily, impairment in the novel has been read unproblematically as loss, an undesired deviance from a condition of regularity vital to stable closure of the marriage plot. In fact, the most visible aspects of disability in the novel have traditionally been understood in rather rudimentary symbolic terms—the blindness of Rochester and the “madness” of Bertha apparently standing in for other aspects of identity. The Madwoman and the Blindman: Jane Eyre, Discourse, Disability resists this traditional reading of disability in the novel. Informed by a variety of perspectives—cultural studies, linguistics, and gender and film studies—the essays in this collection suggest surprising new interpretations, parsing the trope of the Blindman, investigating the embodiment of mental illness, and proposing an autistic identity for Jane Eyre. As the first volume of criticism dedicated to analyzing and theorizing the role of disability in a single literary text, The Madwoman and the Blindman is a model for how disability studies can open new conversation and critical thought within the literary canon.

Literary Disability Studies (New Palgrave Macmillan Book Series)

by Julia Miele Rodas, Elizabeth J. Donaldson, and Professor David Bolt

""Literary Disability Studies is the first book series dedicated to the exploration of literature... more ""Literary Disability Studies is the first book series dedicated to the exploration of literature and literary topics from a disability studies perspective. Focused on literary content and informed by disability theory, disability research, disability activism, and disability experience, the Palgrave Macmillan series provides a home for a growing body of advanced scholarship exploring the ways in which the literary imagination intersects with historical and contemporary attitudes toward disability. This cutting edge interdisciplinary work will include both monographs and edited collections (as well as focused research that does not fall within traditional monograph length).

The first two books in the series are:

Friedrich, Patricia. The Literary and Linguistic Construction of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: No Ordinary Doubt. 2015.

Foss, Chris, Jonathan W. Gray, and Zach Whalen. Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narratives. 2016.

The series is supported by an editorial board of internationally-recognised literary scholars specialising in disability studies:
• Michael Bérubé, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Literature, Pennsylvania State University.
• G. Thomas Couser, Professor of English Emeritus, Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York.
• Michael Davidson, University of California Distinguished Professor, University of California, San Diego.
• Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Professor of Women’s Studies and English, Emory University, Atlanta.
• Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson, Professor of English Emerita, Miami University, Ohio.

For information about submitting a Literary Disability Studies book proposal, please contact David Bolt ([email protected]), Elizabeth J. Donaldson ([email protected]), and/or Julia Miele Rodas (Julia.Rodas@ bcc.cuny.edu)"

Radical Lessons in the Wake of Black Lives Matter

by Julia Miele Rodas and Julio Rodriguez

Radical Teacher: a socialist, feminist, and anti-racist journal on the theory and practice of teaching, 2019

This graphic essay is about an exercise developed for the community college composition classroom... more This graphic essay is about an exercise developed for the community college composition classroom, using words & pictures to make a graphic "response paper." In addition to other benefits, this exercise frees up student thinking, often resulting in compositions that show more insight and intellectual sophistication than conventional essays, a richer understanding that can later be tapped to add greater dimension to conventional expository writing.

“Narrative Architecture and Autistic Voice in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” Disabling Romanticism: Body, Mind, and Text. Ed. Michael Bradshaw. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 169-90. Print.

Rodas addresses rhetorical and narrative interstices of Frankenstein, exploring the ways in which... more Rodas addresses rhetorical and narrative interstices of Frankenstein, exploring the ways in which the visible sutures of the novel defamiliarise intuitive language and social contact, bringing the reader into a complicit relationship with autism. Rodas observes that the creature’s hovel is simultaneously a container for the disposal of rejected creation and a sanctuary that shields the emergent self and allows it the privacy to develop: the space, and the being which inhabits it, constitute a representation of Romantic autism, an extreme of solitary self-ness, the ultimate expression of solitude. While the infamous ‘monster’ evokes the idea of the feral child that has often been associated with autism, however, Rodas proposes that Shelley’s novel provokes a more intimate relationship with autism than audiences might initially realise: the narrative strategies of the text bind the reader into a seemingly paradoxical experience of muteness and verbal precocity, and a correlative hyper-consciousness of boundaries—both rhetorical and social.

Here There Be Monsters: Teaching Disability Studies at CUNY’s Bronx Community College.

Describes approaches, assignments, and philosophy behind teaching disability studies in an urban ... more

YouDescribe: Testing Crowd-sourced Video Description for Service Learning at the City University of New York

This article has a very simple purpose: to review a free, crowd-sourced video description platfor... more This article has a very simple purpose: to review a free, crowd-sourced video description platform called YouDescribe, to discuss its usefulness as an accessibility tool, and to contemplate a number of crucial factors for creating a video description assignment as a service-learning project for a community college composition course. This practical review is followed by a reflection exploring the unexpected pedagogical insights that were an outgrowth of the review process.

How I Wore My Trollope T-Shirt to the Dickens House Museum (And Other Musings of an American Trollopian in England)

Brief comic academic memoir piece regarding a Trollopian's sabbatical travel to England.

"Limited Visibility, or, Confessions of a Satellite." Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture (special issue: “Caring For, Caring With: Pedagogical Responses to Living with Disabled People,” ed. Allison Hobgood) 15.3 (Oct 2015): 493-505. Print.

In March 2013, a New York Times cover story exposing the author's childhood relationship with dis... more In March 2013, a New York Times cover story exposing the author's childhood relationship with disability forced Rodas to confront her usual practice of nondisclosure in the disability studies classroom. This article is both memoir and identity theory, a remembrance of the writer's childhood experience as guide and companion to a blind and spectacularly noticeable sibling, an exploration of the possibilities and politics of ambiguous disability identity, and a meditation on the responsibilities and pitfalls of disability identity politics and practice. Contextualized by theoretical writing about self-disclosure and pedagogy, the article traces the writer's own learning trajectory around public exposure, disability identity, and disability representation, visiting the politics of language, considering how disability insiders should respond to novice thinkers about disability, and contemplating questions of legitimacy, hierarchy, and political territory. While couched in autobiographical terms, at its heart the article explores implicit relationships of power and violence around the naming or claiming of disability identity—violating exposures, colonizing practices, grappling for ownership—and proposes a “satellite” model to figure the way many ostensibly nondisabled people discover and define themselves in relation to the apparent centrality and authenticity of disability.

"Identity." Keywords for Disability Studies. Eds. Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin. New York: New York University Press, 2015. 103-104.

Disability identity has a complex and dynamic history. Viewing disability as a social constructio... more Disability identity has a complex and dynamic history. Viewing disability as a social construction has been a crucial political concept, a mode of resistance to the pejorative constructs of the social majority and received forms of knowledge that insist on disability exclusively as a medical condition or fact of the body. However, disability identity is also increasingly interlaced with other ongoing social, political, and academic explorations and disability scholars and activists, redressing the early limits of critical disability studies, are working within race studies and global studies frameworks to expand and complicate ideas of disability identity.

"PreOccupied." Social Text Online: Periscope (special issue: DSM-CRIP. Eds. Merri Lisa Johnson and Anna Mollow). 24 Oct 2013. Web. 28 Oct 2013.

Social Text Online: Periscope (special issue: DSM-CRIP. Eds. Merri Lisa Johnson and Anna Mollow), Oct 24, 2013

The DSM resonates with autistic logical, linguistic, and cognitive preferences in its taxonomic ... more The DSM resonates with autistic logical, linguistic, and cognitive preferences in its taxonomic practice. However, this ought not to be regarded as deficit; rather, autism’s devotion to taxonomy may be seen as interpretive, curatorial, exploratory, the language of order not laying out the way it is, but serving instead to investigate content relationships.

"Frankenstein's 'Monster': Autism and Articulation in Mary Shelley's Novel and Beyond." BIBLION: OUTSIDERS, The Afterlife of Shelley and Frankenstein. 7 Jun 2012. Web. 3 Jun 2015.

Grounded in Boris Karloff’s 1931 film performance and confirmed by countless other films, comics,... more Grounded in Boris Karloff’s 1931 film performance and confirmed by countless other films, comics, and popular representations, the prevalent sense of Frankenstein’s “monster” is of a being mute or nearly speechless, a grunting creature, who—if he talks at all—does so in disjointed monosyllables. Such a depiction, though, tells less than half the story: the Creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is, in fact, a remarkably eloquent and incisive speaker, capable of measured, intelligent, wholly articulate argument. Why has popular culture largely denied the Creature this reasonable human voice? Drawing on Enlightenment discussions of the so-called Wild Boy of Aveyron and present-day arguments about how autism “speaks,” this short essay suggests that there is an important connection between the ways the Creature is represented and contemporary concerns about the representation and articulation of autism. [This is an abridged version of a talk given at the NYPL in August 2011.]

“Diagnosable: Mothering at the Threshold of Disability” in Disability and Mothering. Disability and Mothering: Liminal Spaces of Embodied Knowledge. Eds. Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson and Jen Cellio. Syracuse Univ Press, 2011. Print. 113-26.

This is an essay about a hotly contested issue in the experience and theory of disability: The qu... more This is an essay about a hotly contested issue in the experience and theory of disability: The question of how to locate, talk about, and live with an ambiguous disability identity. Because many disabilities are not immediately evident, because many are progressive or create erratic episodes of impairment, and because cultural and political considerations factor largely into competing definitions of disability historically and globally, scholars and activists have been keenly attentive to how individuals locate themselves in relation to disability. While I identify with disability identity in broader terms, however, I do not want to reduce myself to a label for the social convenience of my peers. And, while my desire for medical definition offers the possibility of affirmation, it also facilitates a greater threat. For the labeling of disability effectively generates exclusion and misunderstanding, leading to the dismissal of the person as an individual; bias abounds. There are strong competing concerns in this liminal space: unless we self-identify, we participate in the rampant oppression of and discrimination against disability, but I feel stronger and better acting out my resistance from the margin of what Tobin Siebers has called the disability “masquerade” than I do by potentially acting collectively with friends and colleagues who self-identify. My desire to remain in the indefinite, occupying the “diagnosable” space, is not so much an unwillingness to stand up politically as it is a desire to challenge the disciplinary and diagnostic boundaries of the conventional order. For my own sake, certainly, for the sake of my children, but also for the sake of my colleagues, my neighbors, and my fellow parents, I embrace this undisciplined space, rejecting the confinement of diagnosis and thus choosing to challenge the narrowing definition of human “normalcy.”

“On Blindness,” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 3.2 (2009): 115-130. Print. 115-30.

Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, Jan 1, 2009

Inept, inspired, pathetic, entombed, insatiable, or monstrous: the conventions that are ordinaril... more Inept, inspired, pathetic, entombed, insatiable, or monstrous: the conventions that are ordinarily used to represent blind people reveal far more about our culture than they do about the experience of blindness. This speculative essay examines the place of the blind figure in sighted culture, focusing especially on the role of language in shaping popular conceptions of and associations with blindness. Considering such common sayings as ‘blind rage,’ ‘blind alley,’ ‘blind justice,’ and ‘the blind leading the blind,’ the essay contemplates our myriad perceptions and constructions of blindness and blind people.

"social construction," The Encyclopedia of American Disability History. Susan Burch, ed. Paul Longmore, intro. New York, Facts on File, 2009. 837-38. Print.

“‘On the Spectrum’: Rereading Contact and Affect in Jane Eyre,” Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 4.2 (Summer 2008). Web.

ncgsjournal.com

“‘On the Spectrum’: Rereading Contact and Affect in Jane Eyre” engages the early writing of autis... more “‘On the Spectrum’: Rereading Contact and Affect in Jane Eyre” engages the early writing of autism pioneers Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger and considers Jane’s unusual affect and sociality within the context of medical, theoretical, and autobiographical writing on autism, ultimately suggesting that Jane occupies a place on the autistic spectrum. Rodas argues that readers tend to contextualize Jane’s emotional experience, the interiority of her passionate emotional life, her reduced affect, and the concealing of her deeply rooted feelings in terms of cultural history, understanding her extreme self-control and apparent poise as fitting with historically appropriate social conventions. This article points out, however, that because readers experience this self-control from the inside, Jane’s passions are highly visible and her most obvious autistic characteristics, her silence, flattened affect, and remoteness have rarely been noticed or questioned beyond a feminist context. This essay claims that Jane’s aloofness and social idiosyncrasy do not represent a tacit acceptance—as some have argued—of the exploitation and oppression of subject peoples, but point rather to the political significance of solitude. Thus, Jane achieves new political stature, becoming a model for effective resistance to social control, her “private fecundity seeding possibilities for oppressed and marginalized peoples, especially autistic persons,” who reject the punishing demands of “compulsory sociality.”

“A Disability Awareness Poster Contest at Bronx Community College of The City University of New York (CUNY),” Disability Studies Quarterly 28.4 (Fall 2008). Web.

The student art presented here (including detailed verbal descriptions) grows out of a disability... more The student art presented here (including detailed verbal descriptions) grows out of a disability awareness poster contest held at Bronx Community College of the City University of New York in the spring semester of 2008. Including a reproduction of a poster by student Carmen Caraballo, this brief article provides a description of the project and discusses the ways in which it offered enrichment at many levels. Specifically, by involving students, faculty, and administration in its process, the contest successfully supported an expansive awareness mission in a community which does not outwardly embrace visible disability.

“Misappropriations: Hugh Stuart Boyd and the Blindness of Elizabeth Barrett/Browning,” Victorian Review 33.2 (2007): 103-18. Print.

In the spring of 1826, shortly after the publication of Elizabeth Barrett Barrett’s first major p... more In the spring of 1826, shortly after the publication of Elizabeth Barrett Barrett’s first major poem, An Essay on Mind, a scholarly neighbor, Hugh Stuart Boyd, wrote to the young poet to express his admiration and, since they were near neighbors, to suggest the possibility of a visit. A gentleman of independent means, Boyd was a poet-scholar with a prodigious memory but, considered from our present distance, there is little about him that seems extraordinary. It took almost a year to effect the meeting proposed by Boyd in his first letter, but when he and Barrett finally began visiting, the acquaintance seems to have ripened rapidly into friendship. Thus was to begin one of the most important, and one of the most troubling, relationships of Barrett Browning’s life. The forty-five-year-old Boyd and the twenty-year-old Barrett shared an immense love of Classical poetry and the two met frequently to read together, and to discuss literature, politics, and philosophy. Though these meetings seem to have been a real pleasure for the otherwise intellectually-starved Boyd, he was nevertheless careful to maintain proprieties, warning against any intimacy in the relationship. Barrett, however, was frustrated by Boyd’s business-like attitude and longed for something more than a purely intellectual friendship. It seems, in fact, that Barrett came to fall in love with the older, married Boyd.

“Mainstreaming Disability Studies?” Victorian Literature and Culture 34.1 (Spring 2006): 371-84. Print.

Victorian literature and culture, Jan 1, 2006

AMIDST THE CAST OF Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers (1857) is the stunningly beautiful “Signo... more AMIDST THE CAST OF Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers (1857) is the stunningly beautiful “Signora Madeline Vesey Neroni,” who turns the heads of readers and characters alike. “It was impossible,” the narrator informs us, “that either man or woman should do other than look at her” (ch. 10). Dark and mysterious, brilliant and alluring, Madeline Neroni entices the swains of Barchester to pay her court, then toys with them mercilessly and enjoys watching them writhe. The fact that she is both beautiful and without compunction may do little to set her apart from other Victorian villainesses, Trollope's Lizzie Eustace, for instance, Wilde's Mrs. Cheveley or, more infamously, Thackeray's Becky Sharpe, but while Lizzie, Mrs. Cheveley, and Becky ultimately meet with poetic justice, their fortunes descending as their ruthless self-interest becomes increasingly apparent, Madeline keeps herself carefully protected. Pristinely beautiful from first to last, La Signora Neroni guards her virtue and maintains an even temper, bemused both by those who hate her and by those who court her, ultimately returning with her family to their home in Italy, apparently unchanged by her experience in Barchester society. Madeline has a strange kind of integrity; she is a powerful figure, a force to be reckoned with, able to stand up with equal ease and self-assurance to the daunting Mrs. Proudie, the earnest Arabin, and the slick Mr. Slope.

“Tiny Tim, Blind Bertha, and the Resistance of Miss Mowcher: Charles Dickens and the Uses of Disability,” Dickens Studies Annual 34 (Summer 2004): 51-97. Print.

Dickens Studies Annual, Jan 1, 2004

While Dickens is often criticized for his sentimental and apparently objectifying representations... more While Dickens is often criticized for his sentimental and apparently objectifying representations of people (or characters) with disabilities, seeming to render disabled figures as helpless and pathetic victims, as villains, or as objects of fun, his relationship with disabled identity and his representations of disabled bodies (and minds) appear to be more complex than some would believe. This essay, part of a larger work on representations of disability in Victorian literature and culture, looks closely at four figures–Laura Bridgman in American Notes, Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol, Blind Bertha in Cricket on the Hearth, and Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield–in an effort to understand Dickens's ambivalence about disability. Specifically, the essay proposes a new theory–a study of the "satellite" –which helps us to read the relationships of power and identity that surround the presence of disability. The essay employs this theory to argue that the disabled body becomes a locus around which Dickens forms and centers his identity, his sense of himself as a writer and narrator. [Many apologies for the poor quality of this PDF. I decided that some digital access is better than no access at all. For those for whom this document is unreadable, please contact me and I can share an unofficial version in MS-Word format.]

“Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre,” Explicator 61.3 (Spring 2003): 149-51. Print.

The Explicator, Jan 1, 2003

Observes that Rochester may be seen as a physical and psychic reflection of the stigmatized Berth... more

“More than a Civil (War) Friendship: Anthony Trollope and Frank Lawley,” Princeton UniversityLibrary Chronicle LX.1 (Autumn 1998): 39-60. Print.

Points to writer/reporter Frank Lawley as a possible model for the young Lord Silverbridge (Troll... more

Review (Stuart Murray. Autism. New York: Routledge, 2012. Print.) Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 8.3 (2014): 366-69.

Whether they are on the autism spectrum or not, everyone interested in autism—activists, clinicia... more Whether they are on the autism spectrum or not, everyone interested in autism—activists, clinicians, parents, scholars, people—ought to read Stuart Murray’s excellent primer on the subject. Despite its lean profile, Autism provides a surprisingly comprehensive overview of its subject, addressing definitions, contemporary biomedical and philosophical thinking, social history, literary and cultural representations, the standing of various therapies and treatments, and the politics of charitable groups and self-advocacy. The book is divided into three main parts: the first is dedicated to “The Facts”— legal and medical definitions, diagnostic approaches, and emerging clinical knowledge; the second speaks to history, culture, and politics; and the third reviews the intense controversies surrounding the ideas of “cause” and “cure” that are a pervasive aspect of autism discourse. Such a broadly integrated approach makes this book both unique and unusually useful.

Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies

The Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies (JLCDS) focuses on cultural and especially ... more The Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies (JLCDS) focuses on cultural and especially literary representations of disability. Containing a wide variety of textual analyses that are informed by disability theory and, by extension, experiences of disability, it is essential reading for scholars whose work concentrates on the portrayal of disability in literature. More broadly, it is instrumental in the interdisciplinarity of literary studies, cultural studies, and disability studies.

Interrogating Superficiality: At Play with Autistic Rhetorics in Warhol, Whitman, Antin, Carver & the DSM, November 14, 2018, 6:00-8:00pm ≡ Hunter College–West Building, Faculty and Staff Lounge, 8th floor

Autistic Disturbances: Theorizing Autism Poetics from the DSM to Robinson Crusoe, 2018

Intimate conversation about Rodas’ Autistic Disturbances: Theorizing Autism Poetics from the DSM ... more Intimate conversation about Rodas’ Autistic Disturbances: Theorizing Autism Poetics from the DSM to Robinson Crusoe (U Michigan P, 2018), focusing particularly on American texts. The evening opened with an overview of the book’s genesis and framework, offered a brief reading of the autistic “superficialities” visible in some familiar American texts, and culminated with open conversation about the rhetorical and aesthetic value of autistic practices like repetition and listmaking. [hosted by the New York Metro chapter of the American Studies Association (NYMASA) and CUNY’s Hunter College--thank you!]

FRANKENSTEIN & DISABILITY, Lehman College/CUNY, 1 Nov 2018, Bronx, New York

This talk focuses on Frankenstein from a disability studies perspective, looking critically at th... more This talk focuses on Frankenstein from a disability studies perspective, looking critically at the way Frankenstein’s Creature has been interpreted in popular culture—as a “monster,” an outcast, and as an oppressed minority. In addition to discussing the importance of the creature, the talk focuses on specific uses of language and storytelling structure in Mary Shelley’s book, pointing out how some of these features echo autistic ways of speaking. In the end, it shows that it is not only the Creature who can be understood from a disability perspective, but that the novel itself speaks with a “disabled” voice. (part of the international Frankenreads celebration co-sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Keats-Shelley Association of America)

For the Love of Lists: Autism and Literary List Writing

October 1, 2018 ≡ 5:00-6:15pm ≡ Fordham University, Lincoln Center Campus A highlight From Auti... more October 1, 2018 ≡ 5:00-6:15pm ≡ Fordham University, Lincoln Center Campus

A highlight From Autistic Disturbances: Theorizing Autism Poetics.

The language of lists and catalogues is a distinctively autistic form of rhetoric and autism-world is populated by inveterate listmakers, coders, framers, categorizers, collectors, and organizers. While this system aesthetic is prized in many circles, however, such patterning is frequently devalued in the larger culture. List writing is dismissed as banal, vacant, meaningless, or obsessive; indeed, there is a robust cultural association between system aesthetics and totalitarian thinking. This talk will push back against the judgment of literary, cultural, and medical authorities to explore the poetics of list-making from an autism-positive perspective, as a technique imbued with surprising complexity, creativity, and flexibility. Presented at the invitation of Fordham University’s Seminar on Disability Research across Disciplines, a seminar series organized by the Faculty Working Group on Disability and funded by the Provost’s Office.

“BECAUSE THE BUTTERFLY”: AUTISTIC DISTURBANCES OF LANGUAGE AND RHETORIC

book launch & signing for Autistic Disturbances: Theorizing Autism Poetics from the DSM to Robins... more book launch & signing for Autistic Disturbances: Theorizing Autism Poetics from the DSM to Robinson Crusoe

September 5, 2018 ≡ 6:30-7:30pm ≡ CUNY School for Professional Studies

Arguing that autistic expression has been an important contributing factor in many texts, this talk offers an overview of the central themes of Autistic Disturbances, exploring how autistic verbal expression has frequently been miscast as waste and looking at the fundamental aesthetic and creative value of autistic language. Taking an autism positive approach, Dr. Rodas looks at the ways autistic rhetorics thread through and enhance the richness and vibrancy of shared human language.

co-sponsored by the CUNY Disability Scholars; the Columbia University Seminar in Disability, Culture & Society; the Futures Initiative & the CUNY Graduate Center Program in Music–thanks!

YouDescribe: Building Video Accessibility through Service Learning

This presentation reviews a free, crowd-sourced video description platform called YouDescribe, di... more

"Absence, Apostrophe, Fragmentation: Autistic Rhetorics in Frankenstein, Copperfield & 'Bartleby'" (invited lecture). University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH. 29 Apr 2016.

Outlines expressions of autism poetics in Frankenstein, David Copperfield, and "Bartleby, the Scr... more

"Rhetorics of Local Coherence & Autistic 'Silence' in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette." Panel: Dis/ability in Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Culture. NeMLA (Northeast Modern Language Association), Hartford, Connecticut. 19 Mar 2016.

This talk explores the typically unrecognized autistic rhetoric of Brontë’s Villette. Specificall... more This talk explores the typically unrecognized autistic rhetoric of Brontë’s Villette. Specifically, the paper delves into the widely recognized narrative and rhetorical opacity of the novel—aspects of the text which have prompted scholars to note the “queerness” of the narrator (Weinstone), contributed to interpretations of Lucy Snow as a “frozen woman” (Forsyth 21), speak to the novel’s “traumatic moments of narrative amnesia” (Shears and Harrison 27), and which argue that “the apparent intimacy of first person narration [is] never borne out, the trust breached by opacities in the narrative, so that we are imprisoned within Lucy without full knowledge of her” (Beer 182)—and contemplates the ways in which these rhetorical features reflect an autistic linguistic register. Part of a larger project on autism poetics, the focus here is on two salient qualities of autistic language: verbal expression that reads as “silent” and “local coherence.” The former emerges from a powerful construct of autism, fueled by medical discourse and popular culture, that suppresses authentic autistic expression, leading to a false perception of autism as absent, opaque, or silent; the latter (“local coherence”) describes a distinctive autistic inclination for the finite and particular, frequently regarded by mainstream culture as communicative failure rather than cognitive or aesthetic preference. The talk observes the way these aspects of Villette’s rhetoric play against the relentless monologic or apostrophic frame of the larger text, generating an unusual discursive pattern, redolent of autism poetics. Within the narrative of Villette, there is a tension between these three features—silence, local coherence, and persistent narrative monologism. For many readers, this tension functions as a destabilizing rhetoric and contributes to a sense of hiddenness, or, to the feeling that the narrator is pulling away. Without diminishing existing feminist and historically-grounded interpretations that read these aspects of the novel within the context of the oppression of 19th-century British women, this paper seeks to open additional avenues for exploration at the intersection of disability theory, autism studies, and critical feminist thought.

Welcoming Remarks--"Disability Studies as Theory & Practice"--CUNY Disability Scholars Conference 2015

What is the responsibility of the public university with respect to disability studies and what i... more

Inclusive Curating: Autism-System-Art

A talk for Museum Access Consortium (MAC) advocating for recognition of autistic resonances (and ... more

Manifest Pleasures: Litany, Utopia, and Literary Autism

One of the great pleasures of autism is its perseverative reenactments of symbolic order and cont... more One of the great pleasures of autism is its perseverative reenactments of symbolic order and containment. From clinical models identifying and defining autistic "stereotypy" to the repetitive and recursive systems of temporal and spatial exploration favored by many autistic people, the inclination to play with symbolic pattern is widely recognized as a hallmark of autistic cognition, identity, and aesthetic. Regarded as one of the core diagnostic features of autistic "disorder," repetitive signatures of autistic practice are typically understood in terms of deficiency: an inappropriate form of self-expression, an unhealthy or unproductive focus on the nonessential, or, a rigid and mechanistic form of interaction with the world. A growing minority of autism-friendly thinkers, however, has begun to challenge this dominant interpretive consensus, among other things, recognizing the systemizing gesture--the autistic proclivity for pattern--as productive or creative rather than mechanistic, meaningless, or psychopathological. Unfolding this observation within an explicitly literary framework, this talk draws a connection between survivalist inventories, the lists implicitly framed within formal petitionary prayer, and formally structured literary utopias, suggesting a generic relationship between these disparate forms and proposing that all three exhibit a fundamentally autistic literary aesthetic.

autism, system, text

Low-Stakes Writing / High-Stakes Thinking: Integrating ePortfolio and Writing-Across-the-Curriculum

by Julia Miele Rodas, Jeanine Kelley-williams, and Jordi Getman

This interactive session considers the integration of highly compatible pedagogical approaches in... more This interactive session considers the integration of highly compatible pedagogical approaches in Bronx Community College's ePortfolio and Writing-Across-the-Curriculum programs. Using a blend of print and digital technologies, building collaborative writing projects, and inviting student writers to engage from a variety of cognitive modes, the presenters break down experiential boundaries between personal and academic learning for both students and faculty.

Pushing the Envelope: Rethinking Learner Centered Pedagogies at Bronx Community College

by Julia Miele Rodas and Jordi Getman

Like Gulliver in Brobdingnag: Catcher in the Rye, Autism, and Collective Dissent in Singular Form

I suggest that the voice exploding from this text is not only that of the individualist or the an... more I suggest that the voice exploding from this text is not only that of the individualist or the anti-hero, but that Catcher echoes with an explicitly autistic vibration, its attenuated modernist tone, its deeply idiosyncratic affect, its meticulous perseverative perspective, and its implicit monologism combining to resonate distinctively with autistic aesthetic and rhetoric; and, I would like to suggest, in turn, that collective dissent is often expressed in these terms, as an autistic resonance that flourishes in texts like Catcher, and which relies on human singularity to speak for social, political, and aesthetic values it turns out are widely shared in our culture.

A Call to Order: Listmaking, Autism, and Creative Cognition

There is an implicit relationship between the practice of aligning objects and the practice of al... more There is an implicit relationship between the practice of aligning objects and the practice of aligning abstract symbols—including words. This prioritizing of symbolic collection, alignment, and organization reflects autistic aesthetic and cognitive perceptual habits. In fact, listmaking, as autistic practice, informs enshrined mainstream textual products like scientific catalogue, litany, and formal poetry.

Autistic Architecture in Digital Games: Narrative, Voice, Play

Videogame narratives--in their hyperstructural architecture--privilege autistic voice and an auti... more

Looking for Autism in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

The infamous “monster” at the center of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein presents a tempting target fo... more The infamous “monster” at the center of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein presents a tempting target for diagnostic interpretation, evoking the idea of the feral child (or, l’enfant sauvage) that has often been associated with autism. But Shelley’s complex and disturbing novel provokes a more intimate relationship with autism than audiences might initially realize; for the narrative strategies of the text bind the reader into a seemingly paradoxical experience of “muteness and verbal precocity” and a correlative hyper-consciousness of boundaries—both rhetorical and social—that resonate profoundly with what might be understood as an autistic approach or aesthetic. This talk delves into the semiotic, rhetorical, and narrative interstices of the Frankenstein text to explore the ways in which the visible sutures of the novel defamiliarize intuitive language and social contact and bring the reader into a complicit relationship with autism.

“Detail and Abstraction: Martha Stewart, Autism, and Utopian Narrative”

What does Martha Stewart have to teach us about autistic voice? By bringing typically invisible ... more What does Martha Stewart have to teach us about autistic voice?

By bringing typically invisible social rules and customs into relief in staged social environments, Stewart’s work challenges the hegemony of transparent human social intuition and uses symbolic tools to facilitate understanding of and interaction with normative human sociality. Though demonized for her apparent materialism, and for her seeming aggrandizement of the trivial, Martha Stewart is, in fact, an artist of structure and composition and her work may certainly be read as aligning with a utopian tradition that is deeply rooted in autistic values and aesthetic. In fact, the compositions constructed under the institutional authorship of Martha Stewart may serve as the paradigm for other more traditionally understood utopian texts, which (like Stewart’s creations) have both narrative and spatial dimension, which embrace fiction and the fantastic, which reflect on the implication of personhood within narrative, which bring the ordinarily invisible rules and connective threads of human social relationship into relief, and which begin to decode the role played by the individual within lived narrative. As an expert fabricator of social narrative, Stewart, this often-vilified icon of domesticity, brings people, props, and space into predetermined social configurations, creating sheltered imaginative space that abstracts and figures conventional human sociality, ultimately helping to render visible the autistic aesthetic which underlies the greater utopian project.

Frankenstein's "Monster": Autism and Articulation in Mary Shelley’s Novel and Beyond

Grounded in Boris Karloff’s 1931 film performance and confirmed by countless other films, comics,... more Grounded in Boris Karloff’s 1931 film performance and confirmed by countless other films, comics, and popular representations, the prevalent sense of Frankenstein’s “monster” is of a being mute or nearly speechless, a grunting creature, who—if he talks at all—does so in disjointed monosyllables. Such a depiction, though, tells less than half the story: the Creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is, in fact, a remarkably eloquent and incisive speaker, capable of measured, intelligent, wholly articulate argument. Why has popular culture largely denied the Creature this reasonable human voice? Drawing on Enlightenment discussions of the so-called Wild Boy of Aveyron and present-day arguments about how autism “speaks,” this talk suggests that there is an important connection between the ways the Creature is represented and contemporary concerns about the representation and articulation of autism.

Autistic Aloneness and Social Space: Robinson Crusoe and Narrative Architecture

It is with some trepidation that I here confess that my first thoughts linking Daniel Defoe·s Rob... more It is with some trepidation that I here confess that my first thoughts linking Daniel Defoe·s Robinson Crusoe (1719) with autism had to do with the protagonist·s remarkable partiality for enclosures and fortifications. Resonating powerfully with Bruno Bettelheim·s long-discredited notion of autism as an ´empty fortress,µ Robinson Crusoe·s architectural aesthetic is so absolutely typified by walls, fences, hedges, bulwarks, and physical barriers of all kinds that the novel may appear as a kind of parody of popular discourse regarding autism. That autism is often seen as a condition of being walled-in is so ubiquitous a representation as to be patently cliché. As Joseph Straus writes, autistic people are typically seen as ´concealed or imprisoned, inaccessible to the outside world, which is implicitly invited to tear the wall downµ (ms 17). Likewise, Stuart Murray notes that there is a ´continued resonance of [Bettelheim·s] idea of autism being a kind of ¶fortress·, or state of siegeµ (175). Though it has not served as a productive model for understanding or interacting with autism, the motif of fortification has nevertheless served as an enduring metaphor for the way autism is popularly represented.

Syllabus--Introduction to English Literature since the Romantics

Race-conscious/antiracist syllabus for introduction to English literature since the Romantics. Cu... more Race-conscious/antiracist syllabus for introduction to English literature since the Romantics. Curriculum is focused on literature of England, but foregrounds the existence and role of people of color in respect to assigned texts. Designed for Bronx Community College/CUNY. White professor; majority of students are people of color. Definitely a work in progress. Not intended as a model, but as a starting point. Wanted to share my thinking and work since I know many other faculty teaching similar courses are seeking mutual aid. More detailed syllabus, assignments, reading, etc. available upon request. (I am especially indebted to Prof. Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina for the scholarship that made this syllabus redesign possible.)

How to #CripTheMet

Simple Disability Studies & art activity, suitable for distance learning. Instructs students how ... more Simple Disability Studies & art activity, suitable for distance learning. Instructs students how to search for disability in the collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and to comment on and share disability content and perspectives on social media. Please use and share. Please use #CripTheMet (note initial capitals) and tag me if possible. I apologize for any problems of accessibility.

Syllabus--Disability, Culture & Society--Doctoral Seminar, Fall 2018, CUNY Graduate Center

DRAFT syllabus for team-taught Doctoral Seminar in Interdisciplinary Disability Studies. Course d... more DRAFT syllabus for team-taught Doctoral Seminar in Interdisciplinary Disability Studies. Course description. Like the fictions of gender and race, disability is a cultural and social formation that sorts bodies and minds into desirable (normal) and undesirable (abnormal, sick) categories. Regimes of representation in literature, art, music, theater, film, and popular culture—the ways that bodies and minds constructed as disabled are depicted—both reflect and shape cultural understandings of nonconforming identities and extraordinary bodies, affecting the lived experience of people understood as disabled, often in negative ways. Drawing on examples from the arts and popular culture, this course will interrogate the many ways disability identity has been confined to rigid and unproductive social, political, and aesthetic categories. It will also explore a significant counter-tradition in which disability is seen as a significant artistic resource and a desirable way of being in the world. Topics will include: the medical and social models of disability; narratives of disability; disability and performance; disability writing (memoir and fiction); narratives of overcoming; the histories and cultures of autism, deafness, blindness, intellectual disability, and madness. We will pay particular attention to the intersection of disability with other more familiar tropes of human disqualification, including race, gender, and sexuality.

RODAS--Prompt for McCloud in-class writing.pdf

Instructional comic for doing an informal comic writing assignment in response to chapter 2 of Sc... more Instructional comic for doing an informal comic writing assignment in response to chapter 2 of Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics.Have gotten great results with this prompt, once students get a little reassurance. [A thousand apologies to those of you who tried to look at this without success--the initial PDF was corrupted--this one should do the trick. Happy comixing!]

RODAS--S18 Fictions of Disability.pdf

Syllabus for Intro course in Literary Disability at CUNY's Lehman College.

RODAS--ENG 112 M-W Syllabus F17.pdf

Syllabus--Composition II

RODAS--Writing about Short Fiction–Advanced Composition (ENG 114) Syllabus F17.pdf

Syllabus--Composition II & Fiction

Composition II syllabus--theme: Unfree

Detailed syllabus for community college advanced composition course with the theme--unfree

Syllabus--Disability & Narrative--Master's level disability lit course

syllabus--composition and prose literature

Syllabus for an advanced compositions course at Bronx Community College CUNY. Introduction to wri... more

Introductory Composition--Bronx Community College

(syllabus) Fictions of Disability--interdisciplinary disability studies with a focus on fiction

(study guide) The Miracle Worker

monsters syllabus, composition II

Peaks and Valleys: A Collaborative Essay about Disability in the Bronx

Springer eBooks, 2024

Brontë's Jane Eyre

Explicator, 2003

Page 1. their own freedom-and life-are at stake is their punishment for being solely interested... more

Keywords for Disability Studies

More than a Civil (War) Friendship: Anthony Trollope and Frank Lawley

Radical Lessons in the Wake of Black Lives Matter

Radical Teacher, 2019

This graphic essay focuses on the use of graphic composition strategies and includes work by cont... more This graphic essay focuses on the use of graphic composition strategies and includes work by contributing authors from my community college composition classroom. The main point of this piece is that *everyone deserves access to important ideas and information and that using comics to teach and to learn disciplines us to pare away the nonessential and prioritize foundational content. Pictures and emphatic word-art help clarify complex concepts for many who might otherwise struggle to master challenging written text. For these people, comics can provide a point of entry to discourse to which they might otherwise have had only marginal access. The exercise discussed in this graphic essay disentangles students from the pressures of performing conventional standards of (white) literacy while providing an avenue into antiracist reasoning and the discourse of public intellectuals of color.

Autistic Disturbances

Here There Be Monsters: Teaching Disability Studies at CUNY's Bronx Community College

Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy, 2016

As a scholar deeply invested in disability studies (DS) and as an educator just as deeply committ... more As a scholar deeply invested in disability studies (DS) and as an educator just as deeply committed to serving students at the City University of New York’s Bronx Community College (BCC), where I teach, I frequently reflect on the way we welcome novices to the field of DS. In the twenty or so years since the publication of Lennard Davis’ ground-breaking Enforcing Normalcy (1995) and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s foundational Extraordinary Bodies (1997), DS in the humanities has moved from an emergent arena of inquiry to a burgeoning field with hundreds of active scholars and dozens of academic programs in the US alone. It has weathered criticism from those who have portrayed it as one of “so many other trendy ‘studies’” in departments “where standards are forgiving and arcane theories flourish” (Allen), or, who derided it as being chief among the “victim disciplines” (Schoenfeld), and DS is now widely recognized and respected in larger academic communities. A 2013 New York Times piece confirms the academic stature of the discipline: “Like black studies, women’s studies and other liberation-movement disciplines, DS teaches that it is an unaccepting society that needs normalizing, not the minority group” (Simon). By every measure—programs, courses offered, scholarly publication, the growth of learned journals and societies—DS is flourishing. With this growth, the scholarly sophistication of DS has also developed. Though the field has always demonstrated substantial rigor, early work necessarily covered essential ground, pointing to the presence and role of disabled characters and authors in fiction, for example, or, reclaiming disability identity for historical figures like Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This initial work has given rise to ever more nuanced scholarship. For instance, early theorists of disability identity favored “people-first” language (e.g., a person with autism), arguing that an individual’s personhood should be respected as the foremost aspect of identity, but as thinking has developed, disability is increasingly regarded as fundamental to the composition of self, and recent scholarly writing in the field is beginning to evidence more direct language, reflecting the integral place of disability in identity (i.e., “autistic person,” or, “autist”). (Jim Sinclair’s widely disseminated “Why I Dislike ‘Person First’ Language” serves as an early expression of such resistance, but recent writing indicates a growing trend in this direction [Collier; Chacala et al.].) Likewise, early DS urged interpretations forwarding disabled agency; disability had for so long (and so destructively) been con-

A Disability Awareness Poster Contest at Bronx Community College of The City University of New York (CUNY)

Disability Studies Quarterly, 2008

The student art presented here (including detailed verbal descriptions) grows out of a disability... more

Misappropriations: Hugh Stuart Boyd and the Blindness of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Victorian Review, 2007

... Page 9. julia miele rodas ... Rather than mourning the absent child, the mother seems to miss... more

The madwoman and the blind man: Jane Eyre , discourse, disability

Disability & Society, 2014

Whilst legislation may have progressed internationally and nationally for disabled people, barrie... more Whilst legislation may have progressed internationally and nationally for disabled people, barriers continue to exist, of which one of the most pervasive and ingrained is attitudinal. Social attitudes are often rooted in a lack of knowledge and are perpetuated through erroneous stereotypes, and ultimately these legal and policy changes are ineffectual without a corresponding attitudinal change. This unique book provides a much needed, multifaceted exploration of changing social attitudes toward disability. Adopting a tripartite approach to examining disability, the book looks at historical, cultural, and education studies, broadly conceived, in order to provide a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach to the documentation and endorsement of changing social attitudes toward disability. Written by a selection of established and emerging scholars in the field, the book aims to break down some of the unhelpful boundaries between disciplines so that disability is recognised as an issue for all of us across all aspects of society, and to encourage readers to recognise disability in all its forms and within all its contexts. This truly multidimensional approach to changing social attitudes will be important reading for students and researchers of disability from education, cultural and disability studies, and all those interested in the questions and issues surrounding attitudes toward disability.

Autistic Aloneness and Social Space: Robinson Crusoe and Narrative Architecture

dislit.umwblogs.org

It is with some trepidation that I here confess that my first thoughts linking Daniel Defoe'... more

Disability and mothering: liminal spaces of embodied knowledge

Choice Reviews Online, 2012

Autism by Stuart Murray (review)

Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, 2014

The Madwoman and the Blindman

Black Autism: A Conversation with Diana Paulin

Limited Visibility; Or, Confessions of a Satellite

Pedagogy

Autistic Voice and Literary Architecture in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Disabling Romanticism, 2016

Autism by Stuart Murray (review)

Journal of Literary Cultural Disability Studies, 2014

Bront�'s Jane Eyre

Explicator, 2003

Page 1. their own freedom-and life-are at stake is their punishment for being solely interested... more

Introduction-The Madwoman and the Blindman