Bryn Mawr Faculty

Shifting Blind Identities in Higher Education features accounts of how blindness and low vision intersect with other dimensions of identity for both students and faculty in higher education. Contributors from a range of institutional contexts illuminate "common but not comparable" experiences, as well as importantly different ones, and explore different intersections of identity while navigating higher education spaces. Each chapter addresses these questions: What is the relationship between seeing and selfhood? What choices do students and faculty make about how they experience and represent the intersections of their vision condition and other dimensions of their identity? What do authors wish others to understand, consider, let go of, and/or embrace regarding their experiences of navigating higher education with blindness or low vision?

Writing in their own unique voices, each author shares details of their lived experiences; analyses of how those are shaped by institutions, social norms, and individuals; and offers action steps for how everyone can make higher education more welcoming to and supportive of not only those with blindness or low vision but also those with a wide diversity of identities and experiences. Shifting Blind Identities in Higher Education inspires both insight and action into cultivating a more accessible and inclusive space in higher education.

When it comes to really knowing a person, is what you see really what you get? Is it ever all you get? In this first critical study and annotated translation of the dramatic masterpiece Four Cries of a Gibbon by the late-Ming dynasty Chinese playwright Xu Wei, author Shiamin Kwa considers the ways that people encounter and understand each other in extraordinary circumstances. With its tales of crimes redressed in the next world and girls masquerading as men to achieve everlasting fame, Four Cries of a Gibbon complicated issues of self and identity when it appeared in the late Ming dynasty, paving the way for increasingly nuanced reflections on such questions in late Ming and early Qing fiction and drama. Beyond their historical context, Xu Wei's influential plays serve as testimony to what Kwa argues are universal strategies found within drama. The heroes and heroines in these plays glide back and forth across the borders of life and death, of male and female, as they seek to articulate who they truly are. As the actors sort out these truths onstage, the members of the audience are invited to consider the truths that they live with offstage.

A revolutionary study of nineteenth-century Parisian cartography and its role in shaping a modern conception of space

Maps are rarely given the same attention as other print media or art forms in urban history. Author Min Kyung Lee shows their rich potential in this lavishly illustrated study, which brings together maps and other archival materials along with drawings and paintings. She works across disciplines to examine mapping practices in the development of nineteenth-century Paris and the transformative role that urban mapping had on the city's modernization. Lee investigates Paris's formation as a modern city, ultimately framing the practice of cartography as a catalyst for the emergence of new spatial and compositional theories.

Beginning with an examination of the emblematic urban plan that Napoléon III gave to the prefect of the Seine, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, in 1853, Lee explores the significance of the map itself; the means of its production through surveying; the methods of its use and reception by architects, engineers, and administrators; and its place in the visual culture of Paris's modernization. At the heart of this exploration is a focus on orthography in architecture and the new quality of exactitude in modern mapping practices. The precise grid structure of orthographic maps and plans evinced a sense of objectivity, yet it was not without political context and social consequences, as Lee demonstrates throughout.

In Virtual Memory, Homay King traces the concept of the virtual through the philosophical works of Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, and Giorgio Agamben to offer a new framework for thinking about film, video, and time-based contemporary art. Detaching the virtual from its contemporary associations with digitality, technology, simulation, and speed, King shows that using its original meaning-which denotes a potential on the cusp of becoming-provides the means to reveal the "analog" elements in contemporary digital art. Through a queer reading of the life and work of mathematician Alan Turing, and analyses of artists who use digital technologies such as Christian Marclay, Agnès Varda, and Victor Burgin, King destabilizes the analog/digital binary. By treating the virtual as the expression of powers of potential and change and of historical contingency, King explains how these artists transcend distinctions between disembodiment and materiality, abstraction and tangibility, and the unworldly and the earth-bound. In so doing, she shows how their art speaks to durational and limit-bound experience more than contemporary understandings of the virtual and digital would suggest.