Georgetown University Scholars Series: Dr. Libbie Rifkin

The German Department held a talk with Dr. Libbie Rifkin (Department of English), who introduced the field of Disability Studies, discussed the inception and growth of Georgetown’s Program in Disability Studies, which she directs, and addressed the challenges and possibilities of access and disability justice at Georgetown and beyond. She also shared insights from her work on the poetics of care. Positing dependency as a fact of human experience that disability is uniquely positioned to illuminate, while focusing on systems that unequally distribute the labor of care to women and especially poor women of color, this work brings feminist care ethics and disability theory together with a rich archive of contextual materials by poets and other cultural producers along the spectrum of disability identity.

Dr. Rifkin works at the intersection of disability studies and modern and contemporary poetry. Her most recent book is the co-edited collection, “Among Friends: Engendering the Social Site of Poetry” (Iowa, 2013). She has also written extensively about avant-garde poetic careers in the 1950s and 60s, as well as about relations between poetry and institutions, both mainstream and “anti-Establishment” in the post-War era.