Hopkins Press Podcast 4.10: Reznicek and Cooper on Disease and Disability - Studies in the Novel Special Issue

Today’s episode features an interview with Lydia Cooper and Matthew L. Reznicek, the guest editors of a brand new special issue of Studies in the Novel focusing on “Disease and Disability.” 

As they say in their introduction to the issue “This special issue offers critical insights into the way the novel as a form intertwines, disaggregates, confounds, and represents the embodied experi-
ence of disability and disease.” 

With articles that consider Nathanael Hawthorne, Ling Ma, Toni Morrison, Somerset Maugham, Wilkie Collins, and more, this discussion sets the stage for a can’t-miss issue of studies in the way novels can “challenge and broaden our understanding of how and why novelistic discourse is uniquely capable of representations of disease and disability”

ABOUT THE EDITORS

Lydia R. Cooper is Director of University Core Curriculum and professor of English with specializations in contemporary American and Indigenous North American literature at Seattle University. They are the author of multiple books and articles on Cormac McCarthy, Indigenous North American literature, masculinity, queer studies, trauma studies, and ecology and literature. They are passionate about teaching, research on the questions at the heart of what makes for a meaningful life, and how to advocate and act for justice in a climate-affected world facing crises of structural inequalities.

Matthew L. Reznicek is Associate Professor of Medical Humanities at the University of Minnesota Medical School, where he uses eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and Irish literature to explore the impact of social, historical, and cultural factors in the experience of medicine and health. He has published widely on the intersection of health and citizenship in the long-nineteenth century, including on writers like Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson, Walter Scott, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charles Dickens in journals like Irish University Review, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and Éire-Ireland. His first monograph, The European Metropolis: Paris and Nineteenth-Century Irish Women Novelists, was published with Clemson University Press/Liverpool University Press in 2017. He is co-editing The Irish Bildungsroman, 1800-Present for Syracuse University Press and The Corpse in Irish Literature for Liverpool University Press. He currently serves as President of the American Conference for Irish Studies.