Ralph Savarese of Grinnell College advances the notion of a much less human-centered empathy by exploring the propensity in autism to attend to objects more than people (February 19, 2014). Focusing on the work of two autistic writers, Dawn Prince and Tito Mukhopadhyay, he investigates the trope of personification, appealing to neuroscientific investigations of the phenomenon in order to distinguish between a categorical and a precategorical engagement with experience. Lyric writing, especially poetry, plays a controlled game with categories, dwelling in the sensory and blurring distinctions through a range of literary devices such as personification and metaphor. For Prince and for Mukhopadhyay, the space of lyric writing appears to welcome autistic difference.

Ralph James Savarese is the author of "Reasonable People: A Memoir of Autism and Adoption," which Newsweek called "a real life love story and an urgent manifesto for the rights of people with neurological disabilities," and the co-editor of three collections, including "Autism and the Concept of Neurodiversity," a special issue of Disability Studies Quarterly. The winner of the Herman Melville Society's Hennig Cohen Prize and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation, he spent the academic year 2012/2013 as a neurohumanities fellow at Duke University's Institute for Brain Sciences. He teaches at Grinnell College in Iowa.

The Disability Studies Initiative at Emory is a new working group (beginning Fall 2013) generated across departments and schools that is dedicated to interdisciplinary research and teaching by faculty and students. The Initiative is led by a group of faculty and students who are interested in the social, cultural, historical, political, and legal dimensions of disability in our world.

http://www.disabilitystudies.emory.edu