Associate Professor and Associate Chair of English Jared Richman has been named as one of the 2022-2023 M. C. Lang Fellows in Book History, Bibliography, and Humanities Teaching with Historical Sources at the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School. The fellowship is specifically designed for faculty and librarians at liberal arts colleges and small universities in the United States and equips instructors with the skills to “discern and convey the human presences in original textual artifacts [and] inculcate wonder in their students.” Dr. Richman will work with instructors and his fellowship cohort at UVA’s Rare Book School over the next two years. The fellowship also makes available matching funds each year of the fellowship to help fellows improve their own teaching, create student-learning experiences, build book-historical culture on campus, foster book-related public outreach programs, or organize an event to raise awareness about humanities teaching with original textual artifacts. Dr. Richman plans to use the funding to work with students from across the college to develop a public exhibition using materials from CC’s own Special Collections that highlight early modern cultural renderings of disability and chronic illness. He will also develop new courses that teach students to engage with original textual artifacts through an understanding of material cultural, digital archives, and bibliographical scholarship.

The M. C. Lang Fellowship connects Dr. Richman’s classroom teaching to his current research project, which traces the cultural construction of Anglo-American speech pathologies to better understand modern attitudes toward communication disorders. By examining historical representations of people with disabilities, Richman suggests, we may apprehend the disability’s place within the shifting political and social hierarchies of the early modern Atlantic World. Dr. Richman has been a member of the Colorado College faculty since 2009, teaching courses on 18th-century literature, British romanticism, Atlantic studies, disability literature and theory, and comics and graphic narrative. He currently is finishing a manuscript titled "Transatlantic Realms: British Romanticism and the Idea of America, 1780-1832," which examines the political and cultural impact of England's post-Revolutionary engagement with the Americas through British romantic literary production. Richman's latest project, titled "(In)audible Bodies and (In)visible Voices: Elocution and Disability in the Long Eighteenth Century," traces the relationship between nascent elocutionary theories of the Enlightenment and disability in Anglo-American culture.