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Touching the Past: questions, methods and approaches to the history of blindness

When: —
Venue: Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square

To register, email Katy k.pettit@bbk.ac.uk

Keynes Library, Birkbeck, University of London, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD

 As part of Disability History Month this workshop covers the work of author and journalist Selina Mills (Life Unseen: A story of blindness. Bloomsbury) in conversation with Dr Heather Tilley (Imperial College London).

We’ll discuss:

  • The author’s background and lived experience
  • A brief description of her book, and the choice of a memoir and historical intertwined structure
  • Why it’s crucial to be aware of your own bias:  key methods and social models around disability: charity, medical, social, inspirational and even ocularcentric.  Why does this matter? 
  • How to include voices of those with lived experience, if you can find them.  Where to look for archives and evidence (usual and unusual places) and how to deal with reading braille (or not)
  • Why historians need to consider the intersectionality of economic status, race, and disability. Does it really widen the net of experience and knowledge?
  • When does the research stop, and the interpretation begin?
     

Heather Tilley will then reflect on the challenges of recovering lived experiences of Victorian blind people from archives, and the role material culture can play in the absence of extensive written records.

Selina Mills is an award-winning writer and broadcaster who is legally blind. Educated in the USA and the UK, Selina has worked as a senior reporter and broadcaster for Reuters, The Daily Telegraph, and the BBC. She has contributed to the ground-breaking BBC/Loftus series “Disability: A New History” (2013) which has been rebroadcast around the world, and  is a regular commentator to BBC Radio 4’s “In Touch” programme. Selina also created the original idea and co-wrote the libretto ‘The Paradis Files’.  Bloomsbury published her memoir and History book “Life Unseen: A Story of Blindness” in July 2023.

Heather Tilley has researched and published extensively on blindness in the nineteenth century, with a particular focus on literary representations of blindness and the history of blind people’s reading and writing practices. Her book Blindness and Writing: From Wordsworth to Gissing was published by Cambridge University Press in 2017.

 

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