Just this last month, Professor Laurel Daen organized the Disability in the Vast Early Americas conference alongside co - organizer, Stefanie Hunt - Kennedy from the University of Brunswick. The conference took place on campus from October 21st to October 22nd and was sponsored by the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at Notre Dame and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture.
This conference specifically focused on representations and experiences and classifications of disability by those in the Americas from the pre-Columbian era to about 1850. It included exciting panel sessions such as, Gender and Disability in Early America, Biography and Representation, Military Histories of Disability, and much more. There were 49 scholars present that gave presentations on these topics and many others. Some of these scholars included, Rabia Belt (Stanford University), Benjamin H. Irvin (Indiana University), and Meg Roberts (University of Cambridge). Overall, the event was a successful one with approximately 140 people registered both in-person and virtually.
