Event details
May
5
HMEI Faculty Seminar: “The Companion Earth: An Environmental History of Pediatric Hospitalization, 1920-1960”
Sara Grossman, the Barron Visiting Professor in the Environment and Humanities, will present “The Companion Earth: An Environmental History of Pediatric Hospitalization, 1920-1960.” Join us in the Briger Hall Auditorium, 11 Ivy Lane, or stream it live. Grossman is the final speaker in the Spring 2026 HMEI Faculty Seminar Series.
Disabled people are often consigned to the edges of the earth as misfits whose “unnatural” bodies serve as a foil for health and normativity. In this talk, Grossman shares archival research on the ways children engaged and were engaged by nature in long-term pediatric hospitals in the early- to mid-twentieth century. Primary source material from this period presents a novel opportunity to re-situate disability history as a form of environmental history and recast the central relation between disabled peoples and their environment. By examining how environments became companions for children living in isolation and often under conditions of medical distress, this talk highlights disabled youth as central agents in environmental meaning-making.
This seminar is free and open to the public. Lunch will be available in the Briger Atrium at 11:45 a.m., and the lecture will begin in the Auditorium at 12:15 p.m.
Disabled people are often consigned to the edges of the earth as misfits whose “unnatural” bodies serve as a foil for health and normativity. In this talk, Grossman shares archival research on the ways children engaged and were engaged by nature in long-term pediatric hospitals in the early- to mid-twentieth century. Primary source material from this period presents a novel opportunity to re-situate disability history as a form of environmental history and recast the central relation between disabled peoples and their environment. By examining how environments became companions for children living in isolation and often under conditions of medical distress, this talk highlights disabled youth as central agents in environmental meaning-making.
This seminar is free and open to the public. Lunch will be available in the Briger Atrium at 11:45 a.m., and the lecture will begin in the Auditorium at 12:15 p.m.
Speakers
Sara Grossman
University programs and activities are open to all eligible participants without regard to identity or other protected characteristics. Sponsorship of an event does not constitute institutional endorsement of external speakers or views presented.
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