Book Launch for Window Shopping with Helen Keller: Architecture and Disability in Modern Culture by David Serlin
Responses by Rachel Adams and Jeffrey Mansfield
Date and Time: 10:10-11:40 AM, Thursday, March 27th, 2025.
Location: 400, The McCagg Gallery, The Diana Center, Barnard College
Registration: Advance registration is required. Please register here before March 24, 2025.
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.
David Serlin is a Professor of Communication at UC San Diego, where he is a core faculty in Science Studies and affiliated faculty in Critical Gender Studies. He is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome (FAAR ’21), where he was awarded the Rome Prize in Architecture in 2021. Professor Serlin’s other books include Replaceable You: Engineering the Body in Postwar America (2004), Imagining Illness: Public Health and Visual Culture (2010); and Keywords for Disability Studies, co-edited with Rachel Adams and Benjamin Reiss (2015). He is a founding editor of the online journal Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, and Technoscience and an editor-at-large for the art and culture journal Cabinet.
Jeffrey Yasuo Mansfield is a principal at MASS Design Group, where he works on a portfolio of projects that uplift the lived experience and cultural memory of the Deaf and Disability communities.
Rachel Adams is a Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where she specializes in 20th- and 21st-century American literature, disability studies, and health humanities. Her latest book, Love, Money Duty: Stories of Care in Our Times will be published in April.
Acknowledgements:
This program is co-sponsored by the Barnard Architecture Department (thanks to the generous funding of the Keating Family) and the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.
This event is coordinated with the Keating Visiting Architect Lecture by Jeffrey Mansfield at Barnard College on Wednesday, March 26th at 6:00 PM. It is also coordinated with GSAPP’s Actioning Summit 7: How to Project Disability Forward, co-curated by Ignacio Galan together with Andrés Jaque, Dean, and Bart-Jan Polman, Director of Exhibitions and Public Programming and Curator of the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, on Thursday, March 27th at 6:30 PM.
ASL interpretation will be provided. Masks will be encouraged and provided. Please make any accommodation requests in the registration form.
