Catherine Bloomer
Florence Levy Kay Fellow in Premodern Disability Studies
PhD, Columbia University
Pronouns: she /her /hers
Research Interests
Medieval and premodern literature and philosophy; Dante studies; disability studies; crip theory; women, gender, and sexuality studies; Italian studies; comparative literature; digital humanities
Profile
Catherine Shepard Bloomer, PhD, is the Florence Levy Kay Fellow in Premodern Disability Studies with a joint appointment in the Department of English and Classical and Early Mediterranean Studies. Bloomer is a scholar of medieval Italian literature and of premodern disability studies in the Mediterranean world with specialization in gender and the body. She is Associate Director for The New School arts education program WriteOn NYC and Assistant Editor for Digital Dante, an online repository for original research and ideas on Dante and his work. Bloomer's work combines textual analysis, material culture, and disability theory to examine the history, representation, and treatment of disability in premodern texts.
Current Project
Blameless Defect: A Dantean Model of Disability
This book project in progress traces how Dante and his contemporaries across the Mediterranean represented and treated the concept of physical disability. Dante’s representation reflects and engages with the medieval concept of virtue or vice that can be read on the body; specifically, Dante’s engagement with deafness reveals what the book proposes as a Dantean category of "blameless defect" that indicates separation between disability and sin and exonerates those who have what Dante calls "impediments" that limit their knowledge, such as those with lived experience of disability. This treatment of "blameless defect" is contextualized through its philosophical, historical, legal, and literary sources.
Selected Awards
- Columbia University Preceptor Teaching Award (2021-2022)
- Claudia Rattazzi Papka Memorial Grant, , Columbia University (2021-2023)
- Advanced Certificate in Comparative Literature, Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, Columbia University (2020)
- Feminist Pedagogy Graduate Certificate, Columbia University (2019)
- Helen and Howard R. Marraro Fellowship, Columbia University (2018-2019)