David Serlin
Author 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/
Phone: 858-534-6327
Address: Department of Communication
UC San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive
La Jolla, CA 92093-0503
USA
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/
Phone: 858-534-6327
Address: Department of Communication
UC San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive
La Jolla, CA 92093-0503
USA
less
InterestsView All (13)
Uploads
Papers
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.