Lennard Davis

Lennard J. Davis is Professor in the English Department in the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he had also served as Head. In addition, he is Professor of Disability and Human Development in the School of Applied Health Sciences of the University of Illinois at Chicago, as well as Professor of Medical Education in the College of Medicine. He is also director of Project Biocultures, a think-tank devoted to issues around the intersection of culture, medicine, disability, biotechnology, and the biosphere. He is the author of The Disability Studies Reader, My Sense of Silence: Memoirs of a Childhood with Deafness, and Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body, among other books.

His new book is Obsession: A History.

Last week I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

I tend read a lot of books at once. Right now I'm reading Russell Shorto's The Island at the Center of the World, David Lodge's Deaf Sentence, Judith Butler's The Psychic Life of Power, and a book in French I just picked up in Paris from a show at the Rodin Museum about Freud and Rodin as collectors of antiquities. I'm also paging through the catalog from the Courbet show at the Met in NYC.

Visit Lennard Davis' website, and learn more about Obsession: A History at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue