Unfunny: Pandemic, Comics and What Matters Most

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Eileen Barroso

Rachel Adams

A professor of English at Columbia University and the mother of a disabled son, Rachel Adams grappled with the implications of her son’s disabilities and high-risk status during the pandemic by writing a graphic memoir. In this UW-Madison Center for the Humanities talk, she will discuss her work, and why comics proved to be an effective way of writing on the topics of illness, disabilities and healthcare disparities. Adams is also the author of Raising Henry: A Memoir of Motherhood, Disability, and Discovery, which was published in 2013.

press release: "In March 2020 I found myself living in the epicenter of a global pandemic with a son whose disabilities put him at high risk of complications. The possibility of medical rationing meant that he might receive inferior care, or no medical care at all. To stave off madness, I started to write a graphic memoir about our confinement, which tries to explain the value of a life discounted by conventional standards of intelligence or ability. This talk will explore why I found comics an ideal form for writing about illness, disability, and healthcare disparities, drawing on examples from my own recent work."   

Rachel Adams is professor of English at Columbia University. Her most recent book is Raising Henry: A Memoir of Motherhood, Disability, and Discovery, published by Yale University Press in 2013 and winner of the 2014 Delta Kappa Gamma Educators' Award.  Her other books include Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination and the co-edited Keywords for Disability Studies. In addition to many academic articles, she has also written for The New York Times, Washington Post, Salon, the Chronicle of Higher Education, The San Francisco Chronicle, and the Times of London. In 2010 she was the recipient of the Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award and won a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2019-2020.