Research Guides: Disability Studies: Finding Books

Examples of Subject Headings

Since Disability Studies encompasses many fields of study (history, sociology, law, the arts, economics, anthropology and communications, for example), relevant books will appear in many different sections of the library. Use either keywords or Subject Headings to search the online catalog for useful books.

To search the catalog by Subject Heading, select "Subject Terms" from the "Fields" drop-down menu on the Advanced Search page. Here's a partial list of Subject Headings you may find helpful:

Selected Titles

This is just a small sample of books relevant to Disability Studies available at EMU. The library has many more titles. Please do not hesitate to ask a librarian for assistance.

Disability and Passing: Blurring the Lines of Identity by J. (Ed.)
Publication Date: 2013
Explores the intersections of disability, race, gender, and sexuality as these various aspects of identity influence each other and make identity fluid; Argues that the line between disability and normality is blurred, discussing disability as an individual identity and as a social category.
Cultural Locations of Disability by S. Snyder
Publication Date: 2006
Traces how disabled people came to be viewed as biologically deviant; Explains how disabled people are instrumental to charting the passage from a disciplinary society to one based upon regulation of the self.
Studying Disability: Multiple Theories and Responses by E. DePoy
Publication Date: 2010
Reviews existing theories, then sets forth a new viewpoint that incorporates disability studies, sociology, human services, rehabilitation counseling, and public health.
The Disability Studies Reader by L. Davis (Ed.)
Call Number: 3rd Level; HV1568 .D5696 2013
Publication Date: 2013
Emphasizes the global, transgender, homonational, and posthuman conceptions of disability.
Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body by L. Davis
Publication Date: 1995
Studies the history and contemporary significance of the cultural assumptions that govern our conception of people with disabilities.
Bodies in Commotion: Disability & Performance by P. Auslander
Publication Date: 2005
Explore topics ranging from theater and dance to multi-media performance art, agit-prop, American Sign Language theater, and wheelchair sports.

Disability in Literature

Disability, Literature, Genre: Representation and Affect in Contemporary Fiction by R. Cheyne
Publication Date: 2019
Examines the intersection of disability and genre in popular works of horror, crime, science fiction, fantasy, and romance published since the late 1960s.
The Disarticulate: Language, Disability, and the Narratives of Modernity by J. Berger
Publication Date: 2014
Drawing on the figures in works such as Billy Budd, The Sound and the Fury, Nightwood, White Noise, and The Echo Maker, among others, Berger shows how these characters mark sites at which aesthetic, philosophical, ethical, political, medical, and scientific discourses converge.
Figuring Madness in Nineteenth-Century Fiction by C. Wiesenthal
Call Number: (sign in to request from storage)
Publication Date: 1997
Offers new interpretations of both canonical and non-canonical texts by authors spanning from Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope to Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Henry James.
Demons of the Body and Mind: Essays on Disability in Gothic Literature by R. Anolik (Ed.)
Call Number: 3rd Level; PR830.T3 D46 2010
Publication Date: 2010
Examines the ways in which those suffering from mental and physical ailments are refigured as Other, and how they are imagined to be monstrous.
Monstrous Kinds: Body, Space, and Narrative in Renaissance Representations of Disability by E. Bearden
Call Number: 3rd Level; PN56.D553 B43 2019
Publication Date: 2019
Explores textual representations of disability in the global Renaissance; Analyzes the cultural valences of early modern disability across a broad national and chronological span, attending to the specific bodily, spatial, and aesthetic systems that contributed to early modern literary representations of disability.
Disability in the Hebrew Bible: Interpreting Mental and Physical Differences by S. Olyan
Publication Date: 2008
Seeks to reconstruct the Hebrew Bible's particular ideas of what is disabling and its potential social ramifications; Examines the ways in which biblical writers constructed hierarchically significant difference and privileged certain groups (e.g. persons with 'whole' bodies) over others (e.g. persons with physical 'defects').