This workshop, organized by Germanic Languages and Literatures, will bring Assistant Professor Julia Gutterman to our campus on April 11, 2025 for a medical humanities and disability studies talk on depictions of epilepsy in literature.  Julia Gutterman is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Virginia. Her research brings questions of gender, disability and multilingualism to a wide range of German literature and criticism from the nineteenth century to the present. Prof. Gutterman’s current research project concerns German literature and its intersections with disability studies. The project traces representations of epilepsy in literary productions from the 19th century to today. In so doing, Prof. Gutterman challenges preconceptions inscribed into the epileptic body and asks us to consider the place of epilepsy in disability studies. In placing the sociocultural history of meaning-making associated with epilepsy in conversation with disability studies, Prof. Gutterman examines the way in which anxieties about epilepsy remain persistent even in progressive works that treat with nuance the complexity of other modern multicultural identities. Her work raises questions about the complicated interrelationship of identity and (dis)ability and prepares the ground for a political discourse that looks beyond the identity politics of the 1990s.

Prof. Gutterman holds a Ph.D. in German literature from Yale University, an M.A. in comparative literature from the University of Amsterdam and her B.A. is from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She teaches such topics as transnational and multilingual literature, lyric poetry, Black German literatures and German-Jewish literature and culture. 

The talk focuses on the novel Beside Myself by German-Jewish author, Sasha Marianna Salzmann.  Salzmann grew up in Moscow until 1995, when they emigrated with their family to Germany as Jewish quota refugees.

Prof. Gutterman’s talk on April 11, 2025 is part of the GLL Lecture Series “Making a Difference in German Studies/Focus: Critical Disability Studies/Neurodiversity.” It is cosponsered by The Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, Jewish Studies, Center for Advanced Study; Center for the Study of Global Gender Equity; Slavic Languages and Literatures; Comparative and World Literature; and the LAS Office of Inclusive Excellence.

Please join us!

1080 LCLB- Lucy Ellis Lounge & Conference Center