Ralph James Savarese to deliver Carleton convocation
In his presentation, “The Difference that Neurodiversity Makes, or Reading Novels with Autistic People,” Savarese will dispel misguided notions about autism.
Disabilities scholar Ralph James Savarese will deliver Carleton College’s weekly convocation address on Friday, April 2, from 12:30-1:30 p.m. over Zoom. In his presentation, “The Difference that Neurodiversity Makes, or Reading Novels with Autistic People,” he will dispel misguided notions about autism.
Savarese is a disability studies scholar, poet, essayist, and professor of American literature at Grinnell College. He is the author of “Reasonable People: A Memoir of Autism and Adoption,” which Newsweekcalled “a real life love story and an urgent manifesto for the rights of people with neurological disabilities.” In 2018, he published “See It Feelingly: Classic Novels, Autistic Readers, and the Schooling of a No-Good English Professor,” which the Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism praised as a “collaboration of rare beauty.”
Savarese is also the winner of a National Endowment for the Humanities summer fellowship and a Mellon-funded Humanities Writ Large fellowship, which enabled him to join the Neurohumanities Research Group at Duke University’s Institute for Brain Sciences for the 2012-13 academic year. At Duke he co-taught a course for undergraduates titled, Flaubert’s Brain, and a course for fourth-year psychiatry residents called, The Language of Trauma. Savarese can be seen in the award-winning documentary of the neurodiversity movement, Loving Lampposts, Living Autistic.
Savarese received his BA from Wesleyan University and his MFA and PhD from the University of Florida.
Convocation is sponsored by Carleton College Events. For more information, including disability accommodations, call (507) 222-4308.