- Department of Communication
UC San Diego
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- Author photo © Catherine Opie. David Serlin (pronouns: he/him/his) is Professor of Communication at UC San Diego, w... moreAuthor photo © Catherine Opie.
David Serlin (pronouns: he/him/his) is Professor of Communication at UC San Diego, where he is core faculty in Science Studies and affiliated faculty in Critical Gender Studies and the Interdisciplinary Group in Cognitive Science. He is also a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, where he was awarded the Rome Prize in Architecture in 2021.
Professor Serlin’s research interests include historical and cultural approaches to disability, technology, and the politics of design; architecture, urbanism, and the built environment; material culture and museum studies; scientific and aesthetic histories of the senses, especially tactility and cognition; and feminist, crip, and queer theories of embodiment and subjectivity.
Professor Serlin's books include Replaceable You: Engineering the Body in Postwar America (University of Chicago Press, 2004), which was awarded the inaugural Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize from the Modern Language Association; Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics (co-editor; NYU Press, 2002); Imagining Illness: Public Health and Visual Culture (editor; University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Keywords for Disability Studies (co-editor; NYU Press, 2015); The Routledge History of American Sexuality (co-editor; Routledge, 2020), and Window Shopping with Helen Keller: Architecture and Disability in Modern Culture (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming). He is a founding editor of the online journal Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience.
Outside of academia, Prof. Serlin also writes books for children. He is the author of the New York Times-bestselling beginning reader Baby Monkey, Private Eye (Scholastic, 2018), which was illustrated by his husband, Brian Selznick.
Website: https://communication.ucsd.edu/people/faculty/serlin-david.html
Book website: https://windowshoppingwithhelenkeller.com/edit
This essay can also be viewed at https://placesjournal.org/article/modernist-schools-for-disabled-children-new-deal-era/ In the early twentieth century, the design of schools for children with disabilities was on the cusp of... more
This essay can also be viewed at https://placesjournal.org/article/modernist-schools-for-disabled-children-new-deal-era/
In the early twentieth century, the design of schools for children with disabilities was on the cusp of extraordinary change. The unlikely agent of this change was architectural modernism— “unlikely” because architectural modernism does not have a glowing reputation among historians of disability. As Elizabeth Guffey and Bess Williamson have discussed in their volume Making Disability Modern, many of modernism’s avatars were sympathetic to eugenics, while others embraced a utopianism explicitly circumscribed by health and race. These critiques are neither exaggerated nor misplaced; and yet, at the same time, not all forms of modernist design deserve to be cast in an irredeemably villainous role. There is a neglected and altogether forgotten body of work by architects and educators in the United States in the 1930s who used the social potential of modernism to produce designs that better met the needs of children with disabilities. These projects not only improved the lives of thousands of young people but they also permanently changed ideas about what civic care through design might look like. Apparently, the didactic, coercive version of architectural modernism — the version historians of disability rightly critique — coexisted alongside an empathic, expansive version of architectural modernism that centered children’s experience in surprising and often astonishing ways, giving credence to the observation that twentieth-century modernism was endlessly adaptable as well as endlessly contradictory.
In the early twentieth century, the design of schools for children with disabilities was on the cusp of extraordinary change. The unlikely agent of this change was architectural modernism— “unlikely” because architectural modernism does not have a glowing reputation among historians of disability. As Elizabeth Guffey and Bess Williamson have discussed in their volume Making Disability Modern, many of modernism’s avatars were sympathetic to eugenics, while others embraced a utopianism explicitly circumscribed by health and race. These critiques are neither exaggerated nor misplaced; and yet, at the same time, not all forms of modernist design deserve to be cast in an irredeemably villainous role. There is a neglected and altogether forgotten body of work by architects and educators in the United States in the 1930s who used the social potential of modernism to produce designs that better met the needs of children with disabilities. These projects not only improved the lives of thousands of young people but they also permanently changed ideas about what civic care through design might look like. Apparently, the didactic, coercive version of architectural modernism — the version historians of disability rightly critique — coexisted alongside an empathic, expansive version of architectural modernism that centered children’s experience in surprising and often astonishing ways, giving credence to the observation that twentieth-century modernism was endlessly adaptable as well as endlessly contradictory.
This essay examines the lives of three distinct historical objects: a concrete chunk of curb cut in 1980 from a Denver intersection by local disability activists and preserved by the Smithsonian; a group of polyurethane mannequins made in... more
This essay examines the lives of three distinct historical objects: a concrete chunk of curb cut in 1980 from a Denver intersection by local disability activists and preserved by the Smithsonian; a group of polyurethane mannequins made in 2013 by the Swiss disability advocacy organization Pro Infirmis for display at an upscale department store and on YouTube; and the Esmarch triage bandage, manufactured in 1870 during the Prussian War and preserved in numerous design museums worldwide. Using insights drawn from material culture and museum studies, disability studies, and queer history, we argue that the significance of these objects should not rely on disciplinary interpretations but, rather, on emergent intersectional dispositions within and between disciplines. By “unfixing” these objects from normative historical approaches that tend to “fix” them, we present to practitioners of both queer and/or disability history what we believe are useful examples for innovating archival and curatorial methods.
In 2012, the Illinois Regional Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped in Chicago, designed in the 1970s by US architect Stanley Tigerman (1930-2019), was converted into the flagship offices of a regional bank. During its heyday,... more
In 2012, the Illinois Regional Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped in Chicago, designed in the 1970s by US architect Stanley Tigerman (1930-2019), was converted into the flagship offices of a regional bank. During its heyday, Tigerman’s library was widely recognized as an innovative example of empathic design that engaged the sensory and mobility impairments of its intended patrons. In its conversion to a bank, however, contemporary architects sought to capitalize upon the library as an eccentric icon of mid-1970s postmodernism. In the process, they jettisoned many notable features of Tigerman’s original design. This essay endeavors to show what was lost in the conversion, since the bank chose to preserve that which is most superficially associated with histories of postmodernism while erasing the library’s material commitments to histories of disability. By recovering the original context and guiding principles behind the library’s design and execution, the essay asserts the importance of thinking about disability within practices of historic preservation while also restoring Tigerman’s library to its rightful place within historical assessments of late-twentieth-century urban architecture.
At a time when the US military is cutting costs for retired service members and veterans, there are many charitable and corporate organizations looking to fill in these gaps. For example, the US Department of Veterans Affairs offers small... more
At a time when the US military is cutting costs for retired service members and veterans, there are many charitable and corporate organizations looking to fill in these gaps. For example, the US Department of Veterans Affairs offers small grants to enable some retrofitting of houses for disabled veterans. Meanwhile, charities offer purpose-built Smart Homes to a small minority of severely disabled veterans that utilise technological and spatial engineering and feed into the culture of what might be called home improvement pornography. Smart Homes for disabled veterans are situated at the intersection of various and discrepant fantasies – domestic, consumerist, gendered, professional, military-industrial – of the automated home, and as such are full of technologies that are marked as much by their claims to independence and autonomy as they are by their claims to security and privacy. This article explores the ways in which discourses of independence and autonomy – as instantiated through the example of the Smart Home – represent a contradictory historical shift, one that is structured around a simultaneous movement away from government commitment for the welfare of veterans and a movement towards the promotion of technology as a neoliberal tool for remaking the character of post-service civilian life and private citizenship. Veterans and their civilian counterparts are made dependent on technological devices which offer an illusion of autonomy but are highly orchestrated products of social control through which citizens are spatially and politically isolated.
In the last quarter of the 1930s, Carney Landis, an associate professor of psychology at Columbia University affiliated with the Psychiatric Institute of New York, headed a CRPS-funded research project in which he conducted interviews... more
In the last quarter of the 1930s, Carney Landis, an associate professor of psychology at Columbia University affiliated with the Psychiatric Institute of New York, headed a CRPS-funded research project in which he conducted interviews with one hundred women between the ages of 18 and 35 who self-identified as physically disabled. Landis interviewed the women about their sex lives, their sexual identities, and their relationship to their bodies and published the results in 1942 under the title The Personality and Sexuality of the Physically Handicapped Woman. The book represents conventional psychosexual presumptions about disabled women’s stunted personality and frustrated sexuality stemming from the absence of a Freudian “sexual moment.” Yet the original research notes, housed at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, reveal that many of these women engaged in acts of erotic touching that played a far more dynamic and complex role in the development of their sexual subjectivities than Landis or his researchers could recognize. This article examines how touch and tactility produced meanings for Landis’s research subjects and thus illuminated forms of sexual subjectivity not regularly associated with either histories of disability or histories of sexuality.
Disability, as a differential of urban experience, is rarely integrated into the constitutive subjectivities of modern urban history. Despite the sophisticated theoretical and methodological innovations in the fields of urban history,... more
Disability, as a differential of urban experience, is rarely integrated into the constitutive subjectivities of modern urban history. Despite the sophisticated theoretical and methodological innovations in the fields of urban history, cultural geography, and urban studies over the past three decades, the body that can see, hear, walk, and communicate normatively and/or without assistive technology — no
matter how marginal its social or political status — remains consistently centered and remarkably unproblematized. This essay draws attention to this woeful lack of engagement, and challenges scholars to confront key canonical definitions of
urban modernity as fundamentally linked to the privileges of being nondisabled. The essay concludes with recommendations for “cripping” the spatialization of the
city that might expand the historian’s analytical repertoire, especially since urban modernity has typically relied upon architectural and technological spectacles of the visual, the auditory, and the mobile.
matter how marginal its social or political status — remains consistently centered and remarkably unproblematized. This essay draws attention to this woeful lack of engagement, and challenges scholars to confront key canonical definitions of
urban modernity as fundamentally linked to the privileges of being nondisabled. The essay concludes with recommendations for “cripping” the spatialization of the
city that might expand the historian’s analytical repertoire, especially since urban modernity has typically relied upon architectural and technological spectacles of the visual, the auditory, and the mobile.
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This article uses a photograph of the famous American blind advocate Helen Keller window-shopping in Paris during the late 1930s to meditate on and, ultimately, to challenge the scholarly literature that limits the way we understand the... more
This article uses a photograph of the famous American blind advocate Helen Keller window-shopping in Paris during the late 1930s to meditate on and, ultimately, to challenge the scholarly literature that limits the way we understand the concept of the flâneur, the celebrated street-walker who has been an icon of urban modernity since the 19th century. The essay re-evaluates narratives of urban modernity by suggesting that, in terms of charting genealogies of modern subjectivity, the sensorial and tactile experiences of people with disabilities should be included alongside the able-bodied privileges of the flâneur. The photograph of Keller is juxtaposed with the image of a group of WWI veterans to explore how the gendered dimensions of disability were deployed in French visual culture in the interwar period. The essay closes with a meditation on the possible limits of representing disability in the contemporary French public sphere.
Forthcoming from University of Chicago Press, Fall 2024! Window Shopping with Helen Keller recovers a series of influential moments when architects and designers engaged the embodied experiences of people with disabilities. David... more
Forthcoming from University of Chicago Press, Fall 2024!
Window Shopping with Helen Keller recovers a series of influential moments when architects and designers engaged the embodied experiences of people with disabilities. David Serlin reveals how people with sensory and physical impairments navigated urban spaces and helped to shape modern culture. Through four case studies—the lives of Joseph Merrick (aka “The Elephant Man”) and Helen Keller, the projects of the Works Progress Administration, and the design of the Illinois Regional Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped—Serlin offers a new history of modernity’s entanglements with disability.
Window Shopping with Helen Keller recovers a series of influential moments when architects and designers engaged the embodied experiences of people with disabilities. David Serlin reveals how people with sensory and physical impairments navigated urban spaces and helped to shape modern culture. Through four case studies—the lives of Joseph Merrick (aka “The Elephant Man”) and Helen Keller, the projects of the Works Progress Administration, and the design of the Illinois Regional Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped—Serlin offers a new history of modernity’s entanglements with disability.
The Routledge History of American Sexuality brings together contributions from leading scholars in history and related fields to provide a far-reaching but concrete history of sexuality in the United States. This interdisciplinary group... more
The Routledge History of American Sexuality brings together contributions from leading scholars in history and related fields to provide a far-reaching but concrete history of sexuality in the United States.
This interdisciplinary group of authors explores a wide variety of case studies and concepts to provide an innovative approach to the history of sexual practices and identities over several centuries. Each chapter interrogates a provocative word or concept to reflect on the complex ideas, debates, and differences of historical and cultural opinions surrounding it. Authors challenge readers to look beyond contemporary identity-based movements in order to excavate the deeper histories of how people have sought sexual pleasure, power, and freedom in the Americas.
This book is an invaluable resource for students or scholars seeking to grasp current research on the history of sexuality and is a seminal text for undergraduate and graduate courses on American History, Sexuality Studies, Women’s Studies, Gender Studies, or LGBTQ Studies.
This interdisciplinary group of authors explores a wide variety of case studies and concepts to provide an innovative approach to the history of sexual practices and identities over several centuries. Each chapter interrogates a provocative word or concept to reflect on the complex ideas, debates, and differences of historical and cultural opinions surrounding it. Authors challenge readers to look beyond contemporary identity-based movements in order to excavate the deeper histories of how people have sought sexual pleasure, power, and freedom in the Americas.
This book is an invaluable resource for students or scholars seeking to grasp current research on the history of sexuality and is a seminal text for undergraduate and graduate courses on American History, Sexuality Studies, Women’s Studies, Gender Studies, or LGBTQ Studies.
Imagining Illness is an edited volume of 13 chapters that explores the diverse visual culture of public health, broadly defined, from the nineteenth century to the present. The contributors examine historical and contemporary visual... more
Imagining Illness is an edited volume of 13 chapters that explores the diverse visual culture of public health, broadly defined, from the nineteenth century to the present. The contributors examine historical and contemporary visual practices—Chinese health fairs, documentary films from the World Health Organization, illness maps, fashions for nurses, and live surgery on the Internet—delving into the political and epidemiological contexts underlying their creation and dissemination.
After World War II, the United States underwent a massive cultural transformation that was vividly realized in the development and widespread use of new medical technologies. Plastic surgery, wonder drugs, artificial organs, and... more
After World War II, the United States underwent a massive cultural transformation that was vividly realized in the development and widespread use of new medical technologies. Plastic surgery, wonder drugs, artificial organs, and prosthetics inspired Americans to believe in a new age of modern medical miracles. The nationalistic pride that flourished in postwar society, meanwhile, encouraged many Americans to put tremendous faith in the power of medicine to rehabilitate and otherwise transform the lives and bodies of the disabled and those considered abnormal. Replaceable You revisits this heady era in American history to consider how these medical technologies and procedures were used to advance the politics of conformity during the 1950s.
From the wooden teeth of George Washington to the Bly prosthesis, popular in the 1860s and boasting easy uniform motions of the limb, to today's lifelike approximations, prosthetic devices reveal the extent to which the evolution and... more
From the wooden teeth of George Washington to the Bly prosthesis, popular in the 1860s and boasting easy uniform motions of the limb, to today's lifelike approximations, prosthetic devices reveal the extent to which the evolution and design of technologies of the body are intertwined with both the practical and subjective needs of human beings. The peculiar history of prosthetic devices sheds light on the relationship between technological change and the civilizing process of modernity, and analyzes the concrete materials of prosthetics which carry with them ideologies of body, ideals, body politics, and culture. Simultaneously critiquing, historicizing, and theorizing prosthetics, Artificial Parts, Practical Lives lays out a balanced and complex picture of its subject, neither vilifying nor celebrating the merger of flesh and machine.
Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, and Technoscience serves the expanding interdisciplinary field of feminist science and technology studies (STS) by supporting theoretically inventive and methodologically creative scholarship incorporating... more
Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, and Technoscience serves the expanding interdisciplinary field of feminist science and technology studies (STS) by supporting theoretically inventive and methodologically creative scholarship incorporating approaches from critical public health, disability studies, postcolonial studies, queer theory, sci-art, technology and digital media studies, history and philosophy of science and medicine. The editorial board welcomes submissions at any time.
For more than a quarter of a century, the Radical History Review (RHR) has stood at the point where rigorous historical scholarship and active political engagement converge. The journal is edited by a collective of historians--men and... more
For more than a quarter of a century, the Radical History Review (RHR) has stood at the point where rigorous historical scholarship and active political engagement converge. The journal is edited by a collective of historians--men and women with diverse backgrounds, research interests, and professional perspectives. Articles in RHR address issues of gender, race, sexuality, imperialism, and class, stretching the boundaries of historical analysis to explore Western and non-Western histories.
Invited guest blog for a roundtable, "Soldier Exposures and Technical Publics," curated and edited by Zoe Wool.
Invited guest blog for the Society for Cultural Anthropology
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Research Interests:
How might “cripistemologies” work? Without assuming in advance that we know what such ways of knowing might be, we have gathered in this roundtable a range of queer, trans, feminist, disability, and critical race theorists—namely, Lennard... more
How might “cripistemologies” work? Without assuming in advance that we know what such ways of knowing might be, we have gathered in this roundtable a range of queer, trans, feminist, disability, and critical race theorists—namely, Lennard Davis, David Serlin, Emma Kivisild, Jennifer Nash, Jack Halberstam, Margaret Price, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Jasbir K. Puar, Susan Schweik, Jennifer James, Lisa Duggan, and Carrie Sandahl—to meditate collectively on what those ways of knowing do. How, when, where, and why do queer, feminist, and disability epistemologies converge? What does it mean, in our own moment or historically, to respond to impairment (of body, mind, even behavior) in queer, feminist, or crip ways? If radical social movements of the last four decades have (expansively, even promiscuously) put bodies in motion, in what ways has neoliberal capitalism usurped, contained, or domesticated those bodies? How might that containment or domestication be cripped? What tensions or torsions exist among various cripistemologies? Are certain forms of queer (anti)sociality, for instance, in discord with interdependency as it has been imagined and materialized by feminist disability studies? Are there crip positions, embodiments, or moments of pain or pleasure that necessarily exceed the (compulsory?) identities or identifications of rights-based movements?
This conversation, commemorating 25 years of the Journal of Women’s History, was convened at the 2012 meeting of the American Historical Association as a joint project of the Coordinating Council for Women in History and MARHO: the... more
This conversation, commemorating 25 years of the Journal of Women’s History, was convened at the 2012 meeting of the American Historical Association as a joint project of the Coordinating Council for Women in History and MARHO: the Radical Historian’s Organization. The conversation brought together major senior and junior scholars whose work encompasses both radical and women’s history to address the intersections of the two fields. All of the participants were asked to consider questions including: How did the origins of the fields connect? How have their trajectories converged or diverged across time? What have been the crucial developments in radical history, in women’s history, and in radical women’s history? What might the future hold for radical women’s history?
The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, designed by Le Corbusier and built in 1963, is one of the most important examples of modernist architecture in the United States. Despite its radical design and the aspirational ideals embedded in... more
The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, designed by Le Corbusier and built in 1963, is one of the most important examples of modernist architecture in the United States. Despite its radical design and the aspirational ideals embedded in its architecture, however, the building does not take into account the diversity of bodies that use its space. This problem is not unique to the Carpenter Center but common for buildings of its age. In this edited and expanded transcript of a talk sponsored by the Carpenter Center on April 15, 2021, scholars Wanda Liebermann and David Serlin discuss the Carpenter Center in light some of modernist architecture’s intersections with disability politics, as well as progressive approaches to modernism’s historic preservation and radical accessibility that put the two imperatives into animated, productive conversation.
In this wide-ranging conversation, David Serlin (UC San Diego) and Roland Betancourt (UC Irvine) discuss questions of sexual consent and sexual violence in the visual culture of early Christian art as inspired by Betancourt’s recent book,... more
In this wide-ranging conversation, David Serlin (UC San Diego) and Roland Betancourt (UC Irvine) discuss questions of sexual consent and sexual violence in the visual culture of early Christian art as inspired by Betancourt’s recent book, Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages (2020). Drawing on rare manuscripts and other objects of worship from institutional archives, Betancourt analyzes and contextualizes numerous Byzantine visual texts featuring often confounding representations of sexual acts or gendered behavior that later Christian interpreters would treat as conventional or settled. For Betancourt, early Christian authors and artists were far more open to troubling and experimenting with depictions of sexual and gendered narratives than many medievalists (and, importantly, non-medievalists) have been trained to see.
In this wide-ranging conversation, historians David Serlin (UC San Diego) and Jennifer Tucker (Wesleyan University) discuss the role of material culture and visual media in shaping how museums communicate histories of science and... more
In this wide-ranging conversation, historians David Serlin (UC San Diego) and Jennifer Tucker (Wesleyan University) discuss the role of material culture and visual media in shaping how museums communicate histories of science and technology . Tucker describes recent a public history project focused on nineteenth-century histories of firearms and gun regulation in light of contemporary debates about the Second Amendment “right to bear arms.” Serlin and Tucker conclude by speculating about possible curatorial directions for a future public history exhibit focused on the social and cultural impact of the COVID-19 pandemic during 2020.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
... Simone Ameskamp, Delila Amir, Menachim Amir, Gerhard Ammerer, Laura Stark-Arola, Rainer Baehre, Ruth Barcan, Jennie Batchelor, Lesley Biggs ... Morgentaler, Sharon Morris, Kristy Muir, Chris Norris, Suzanne Nunn, Sarah Oerton, Omi,... more
... Simone Ameskamp, Delila Amir, Menachim Amir, Gerhard Ammerer, Laura Stark-Arola, Rainer Baehre, Ruth Barcan, Jennie Batchelor, Lesley Biggs ... Morgentaler, Sharon Morris, Kristy Muir, Chris Norris, Suzanne Nunn, Sarah Oerton, Omi, Sara Pennell, Glynn Porritt, Fiona Reid ...