Bellee Jones-Pierce

The CoLab’s Intersectionality Talks will be hosting Bellee Jones-Pierce on Wednesday, November 11 at 7pm. This will be an informal conversation about disability poetics; specifically how lived experience can be used to understand literature. The event will be virtual in Zoom. Register for the event here.

Her primary research areas are early modern literature, disability, and poetics. Her work as a creative writer is also concerned with the intersections of formalism and ability. Her book project, Able Verse, suggests the English lyric is shaped by conceptions of disability as they come to metaphor in social and poetic discourse as well as the physical facts of disability itself. Bodily metaphors pervade language used to discuss complex structures, including poetics. Disability studies, therefore, offers a historical and especially useful approach to early modern lyric. Rather than policing metaphor or advocating for the removal of disability metaphors from poetic discourse, she argues metaphors of disability have indelibly marked poetic practice and lyric itself. Her work inflects a historical formalist approach with tools and perspectives from disability studies and builds its arguments upon the vibrant early modern discourses of framing, measurement, quantification, medicine, anatomy, optics, and poetics.