Lecture: Prosthetics & Personhood: Object Histories at the Intersection of Medicine & Disability: Dr. Jaipreet Virdi, University of Delaware

This lecture examines how the crafting and self-presentation of prosthetics allowed people with disabilities to control, if not define, medical discourse over their condition, while also enabling them to assert their autonomy and personhood.

Jaipreet Virdi is an Assistant Professor in the history of medicine and disability at the Department of History at University of Delaware. Her work examines the medical and technological history of hearing loss, especially how consumerism and cultural expectations of “normalcy” governed expectations of cures. She is completing her first book with the University of Chicago Press, Hearing Happiness: Fakes, Frauds, and Fads in Deafness Cures.