Event

Ittai Orr is an assistant professor of English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His research focuses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature with an emphasis on early Native American literature and Disability Studies. His writing can be found in American Quarterly, American Literary History, Early American Literature as well as in The Washington Post and Insurrect!: Radical Thinking in Early American Studies, an online public humanities journal he co-founded with several former fellows at the McNeil Center in 2020. He is currently at work on a book project on theories of the mind before the creation of the intelligence quotient primarily in Native and early African American English-language texts, as well as a chapter for the forthcoming Routledge volume on the History of Disability in America.

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The McNeil Center sponsors a seminar that meets on Friday afternoons approximately twice a month between September and May, with the paper for each session circulated in advance. Over two hundred people attend at least once a year, with an average attendance of 40 to 50 at meetings held at various sites in the Delaware Valley. While most of the regular attendees are graduate students and faculty from institutions in the Philadelphia area, participants come from as far afield as Long Island, New York City, Princeton, Baltimore, Annapolis, and Washington.