Alani Hicks Bartlett will talk about the intersections between gender and disability in the Renaissance, using comparative literature approaches.

Assessing late Medieval and Early Modern literature through a comparative lens drawing from English, Italian, French, and Spanish literary traditions, Alani Hicks-Bartlett's talk focuses on the representation of gender, pregnancy, and the serious engagement with (dis)ability that readers can find in the works of "seminal" premodern authors striving to assert their authorial voices.

While the question of "canonicity" opens a host of agential concerns related to humanism and "Renaissance self-fashioning" that have their own gendered and creative implications, better understanding the connection between pregnancy and (dis)ability in premodern literature helps parse the surprisingly flexible ways in which the "self" was conceived.