Mapping Disability

A Cambridge-Nehru scholar for her Ph D, Christel R Devadawson is Professor, Department of English, University of Delhi. She has served as Head, Department of English, St Stephen’s College from 2000-2001, and as Head, Department of English, University of Delhi from 2015-2018. Her most recent publications in the field of Visual Studies are, ‘AI, Allegory, and the Cinematic Multiverse,’ Phalanx 15, November 2023, and ‘Visual Advocacy, the Gandhi icon, and the Shaping of Contemporary India,’ in David Bulla(ed) Gandhi: Advocacy, Journalism, and the Media, New York: Peter Lang, 2022. She is the author of Out of Line: Cartoons, Caricature and Contemporary India (2014), and Reading India, Writing England (2005).

Anil K. Aneja is a Professor in the Department of English and Director of the Centre for Disability Studies at the University of Delhi. His academic interests include Twentieth Century Fiction, Disability Studies, Human Rights Literature, and more. He has delivered over a hundred conference presentations and published widely in his fields. Actively engaged in the disability sector for nearly 30 years, he has held various national and international roles. He was awarded the National Award for the Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities in 2014 and the Delhi State Award for Social Work in 2019.

Nidhi Vats is an Associate Professor in the Department of English, University of Delhi, with over 13 years of teaching experience. Her areas of expertise include Indian English Literature, Indian Mythology, Language Studies, Folklore Studies, and Disability Studies. She has published extensively, including three books. Her latest book, Foregrounding Disability Studies in Literature and Visual Arts, was published by Oxford University Press.

Chapter 1: Fragmented Bodies, Fragmented Selves: Disability and Identity in Kafka's Universe.- Chapter 2: Disability, Fiction for Girls and the Reluctant 20th Century.- Chapter 3:Crippled Existence and Silenced Souls: A Comparative Disability Reading of Flannery O'Connor and Katherine Anne Porter's Short Fiction.- Chapter 4: Disability and the Avant-garde in William Faulkner's Select Novels.- Chapter 5: Warring Disability: A Reading of Wilfred Owen's Poems.- Chapter 6: Embodied Existence: Interwar Poetics and Disability.- Chapter 7: Medicalization, Eugenics, and Biopolitics: Unveiling the Roots of Disability Consciousness and Activism Before 1950.- Chapter 8: Fragile Bodies, Faulty Ideals: Critiquing American Exceptionalism in Ron Kovic's Born on the Fourth of July.- Chapter 9: Revisiting Myth: Disability and the Sense of the Divine: Andha Yug and The Great Indian Novel.- Chapter 10: Disability Reimagined: Culture, Norms and Human Difference in Early Twentieth-Century Hindi Short Fiction.- Chapter 11: Tales of Trauma and Disability in Partition Narratives: A Study of Sunil Gangopadhyay's Arjun.- Chapter 12: Representing Disabilities in Odia Fiction.- Chapter 13: Mental Disability and Narrative Control in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.- Chapter 14: Reflections on Mental Health Issues and Disability in The Bell Jar.- Chapter 15: Mad Poetics and the Disabled Mind: Gender and Disobedience in the Poetry of Anne Sexton and Hilda Doolittle.- Chapter 16: Illness, Disability and the Autobiographical Impulse: An Exploration of Kay Redfield Jamison's An Unquiet Mind.- Chapter 17: Portrayals of Disability in the Early History of Superhero Comics.- Chapter 18: Shifting Frames: The Evolution of Disability Representation in Mainstream Cinema.- Chapter 19: Their Ears Have Eyelids: Blindness, Sound, and Materiality in Bollywood Films of the 20th Century.- Chapter 20: Ecological Disablism in "The Lost Ones" by Samuel Beckett.