Back from the Disability History Conference

Spent last week on a combination family vacation and conference trip, to the Disability History Conference at SFSU. It was a good conference, small, no book display or anything, just two sessions running concurrently, probably 50-100 people? (I'm bad at guessing such numbers.) I was on two panels, one for the forthcoming Encyclopedia of American Disability History (Facts on File 2009), and one for my project about Marion Brown (1843-1915), with Iain Hutchison (more on that here). Iain brought me a wonderful gift: The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women (Edinburgh University Press 2007). It has an entry on Marion Brown in it (written by Iain), but it has loads of other great stories, and if you're a longtime reader of DS,TU, you know I'm already scanning it for post subjects. Better than popcorn.

One example, for starters: Christian Gray (1772-c1830) was a farmers' daughter from near Perth, who became blind when she survived smallpox as a little child. She was read to, daily, for her education; in time, she began composing poetry, and her first volume of poems was published in 1808. She pointed to Milton and Ossian as her predecessors, and wrote poems about being blind (I can't find any of those verses online yet, though).