Tobin Siebers has been selected for fellowships by the Michigan Society of Fellows, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Institute for the Humanities. In 1999 he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for “My Withered Limb,” an account of growing up with polio. His principal contributions to literary and cultural criticism have been in disability studies. Other areas include: aesthetics and politics of identity, literary criticism of the cold-war era, psychoanalysis, literature and anthropology, and creative nonfiction. Siebers’s major publications include ten books including most recently Disability Theory and Disability Aesthetics. He is also the editor of Religion and the Authority of the Past, Heterotopia: Postmodern Utopia and the Body Politics, andThe Body Aesthetic: From Fine Art to Body Modification. Works in progress include essays on disability aesthetics and the representation of madness.
From 1999 to 2005, Korean photographer Park Young-Sook investigated the representation of women with mental disabilities by photographing gestures and postures used to identify the women as “crazy.” Using The Mad Women Project as a starting point, Siebers will examine the physical echoes of cognitive and intellectual disability, interrogating how aesthetics both participates in the disqualification of disabled people as inferior and stigmatizes appearances associated with disabled minds. Siebers will also explore The Mad Women Project in the context of feminist theory and the work of Cindy Sherman.