Disability justice leader, bioethicist to present Birmingham-Southern's annual Phi Beta Kappa lecture

For Immediate Release
Feb. 21, 2022

Birmingham-Southern College will host Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, professor emerita of English and bioethics at Emory University and senior advisor at The Hastings Center, for two days in March as part of the 2021-2022 Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Program.

At 11 a.m. Thursday, March 3, Garland-Thomson will present “Building a World that Includes Disability,” in the Norton Campus Center Theatre. Garland-Thomson, a disability justice and culture thought leader, bioethicist, educator, and humanities scholar, will explore disability in culture, history, and the arts, tracing the history of the disability rights movement and the flourishing of disability culture, politics, history, aesthetics, and ethics by and about people living with disabilities.

Garland-Thomson consults on academic and bioethics projects and gives frequent lectures, presentations, and media interviews. Her 2016 op-ed, “Becoming Disabled,” was the inaugural article in the ongoing weekly series in “The New York Times” about disability by people living with disabilities. She is a Hastings Center Fellow and Senior Advisor and a Center for Genetics and Society Fellow and is currently chief project advisor to The Art of Flourishing: Conversations on Disability and Technology, a Hastings Center project supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is co-editor of “About Us: Essays from the New York Times about Disability by People with Disabilities” (2019) and the author of several books, including “Staring: How We Look.”

Garland-Thomson has taught disability studies, bioethics, American literature and culture, and feminist theory at Emory University. Her academic and scholarly work develops the field of critical disability studies and the health humanities to bring forward disability culture, access, and justice to a broad range of institutions and communities.

During her two days on campus, Garland-Thomson will engage with students and faculty in a variety of classes and discussion groups.

Phi Beta Kappa is the oldest academic honor society in the United States, claiming 17 U.S. Presidents, 42 U.S. Supreme Court justices, and more than 150 Nobel Laureates among its members. Only 10 percent of the nation’s institutions of higher education shelter chapters; Birmingham-Southern College is one of only three sheltering institutions in the state of Alabama, with its chapter chartered in 1937.

Since 1956, the Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Program has offered undergraduates the opportunity to spend time with some of America’s most distinguished scholars. The program contributes to intellectual life on campus by making possible an exchange of ideas between the visiting scholars and the resident faculty and students.

The March 3 lecture event is open to the public and admission is free. For more information, contact Mark S. Schantz, Department of History, at [email protected].

Those desiring accommodations for Professor Garland-Thomson’s lecture should contact Sandra Morales Foster, Assistant Director of Accessibility Services at Birmingham-Southern College, at 205-226-7909 and at [email protected].

Media contact: Amy Bickers Abeyta, [email protected] or 205-226-4922