Benjamin Reiss
Biographic Data
| ID | 5373274 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Benjamin Reiss |
| GIVEN NAMES | Benjamin |
| FAMILY NAME | Reiss |
| SIGNATURE | REISS B |
| AFFILIATIONS | Emory University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 13 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 12 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
The Mark of Slavery
In a 2001 essay, Douglas C. Baynton argued that “disability” is a master trope to justify discrimination based on supposed innate bodily and mental differences associated with social hierarchies: racism and sexism are imputations of naturally occurring differences in physical and mental ability (Douglas C. Baynton, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History,” in The New Disability History, ed. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri U…
Public Humanities in the Reconstructed University
Colleges and universities that can withstand the fallout of the COVID-19 crisis will need to redouble their efforts to engage students in the kinds of intellectual and social experiences that cannot be attained remotely or in isolation. Public humanities, which promotes collaboration, civic and community engagement, and inter-institutional alliances, can be one such reparative force for the reconstructed university. This essay describes the work …
Sasha Handley. Sleep in Early Modern England
Scientific and medical research has revealed that sleep is anything but a passive state. Though we may largely lie immobile and insensate at night, our sleeping brains remain hives of activity. Any EEG readout will tell you that the brain is in a state of flux throughout the night, from the long, slow waves of deep sleep to the frantic scribblings etched out during REM sleep. Behind all this electrical activity, sleep busily attends to such diver…
Keywords for Disability Studies
Sleeping at Walden Pond
This essay explores Henry David Thoreau's Walden in relation to the history of sleep, considered as a medical, biological, social, and spiritual phenomenon. Attention to Thoreau's striving for "awakening" and "alertness" has veiled his running rhetoric of dormancy: scenes and tropes of sleeping, nodding off, sleepwalking, snoring, dreaming, napping, exhaustion, and catalepsy recur throughout the text, while factory bells, the shrieks of trains, c…
The Cambridge History of the American Novel
"This ambitious literary history traces the American novel from its emergence in the late eighteenth century to its diverse incarnations in the multi-ethnic, multi-media culture of the present day. In a set of original essays by renowned scholars from all over the world, the volume extends important critical debates and frames new ones. Offering new views of American classics, it also breaks new ground to show the role of popular genres - such as…
From Affect to Disorder
Madness after Virginia Tech
In the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings of 2007, a tendency to view mental illness through the lens of “risk” has been exacerbated on college campuses and beyond. Administrators, counseling centers, law enforcement teams, and policy task forces have encouraged widespread efforts to identify potentially violent students before they act and to intervene with counseling and—in extreme cases—removal from campus. Such procedures and policies have t…
The Showman and the Slave
Theaters of Madness
The Arts of Deception
These two books are much alike: Both are thick descriptive cultural histories of Barnumesque humbug and even share a common publisher and origins as University of California, Berkeley, dissertations. Still, they are not at all redundant and are worth reading together. James W. Cook's The Arts of Deception draws on the well-known theme of the nineteenth-century urban confidence man to explore commercial exhibits based on outrageous deception. He f…
The Showman and the Slave
P.T. Barnum, Joice Heth and Antebellum Spectacles of Race
P. T. Barnum, Joice Heth and Antebellum Spectacles of Race Benjamin Reiss (bio) On 25 February 1836, P. T. Barnum orchestrated an event that would launch his career in show business and provide the nascent mass media one of its first great spectacles. 1 Joice Heth, an aged African American woman whom Barnum had exhibited across the Northeast as the 161-year-old former nurse of George Washington, now lay dead on an operating table in New York’s Ci…
The Arts of Deception
These two books are much alike: Both are thick descriptive cultural histories of Barnumesque humbug and even share a common publisher and origins as University of California, Berkeley, dissertations. Still, they are not at all redundant and are worth reading together. James W. Cook's The Arts of Deception draws on the well-known theme of the nineteenth-century urban confidence man to explore commercial exhibits based on outrageous deception. He f…
The Mark of Slavery
In a 2001 essay, Douglas C. Baynton argued that “disability” is a master trope to justify discrimination based on supposed innate bodily and mental differences associated with social hierarchies: racism and sexism are imputations of naturally occurring differences in physical and mental ability (Douglas C. Baynton, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History,” in The New Disability History, ed. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri U…
Sleeping at Walden Pond
This essay explores Henry David Thoreau's Walden in relation to the history of sleep, considered as a medical, biological, social, and spiritual phenomenon. Attention to Thoreau's striving for "awakening" and "alertness" has veiled his running rhetoric of dormancy: scenes and tropes of sleeping, nodding off, sleepwalking, snoring, dreaming, napping, exhaustion, and catalepsy recur throughout the text, while factory bells, the shrieks of trains, c…
P.T. Barnum, Joice Heth and Antebellum Spectacles of Race
P. T. Barnum, Joice Heth and Antebellum Spectacles of Race Benjamin Reiss (bio) On 25 February 1836, P. T. Barnum orchestrated an event that would launch his career in show business and provide the nascent mass media one of its first great spectacles. 1 Joice Heth, an aged African American woman whom Barnum had exhibited across the Northeast as the 161-year-old former nurse of George Washington, now lay dead on an operating table in New York’s Ci…
P.T. Barnum, Joice Heth and Antebellum Spectacles of Race
P. T. Barnum, Joice Heth and Antebellum Spectacles of Race Benjamin Reiss (bio) On 25 February 1836, P. T. Barnum orchestrated an event that would launch his career in show business and provide the nascent mass media one of its first great spectacles. 1 Joice Heth, an aged African American woman whom Barnum had exhibited across the Northeast as the 161-year-old former nurse of George Washington, now lay dead on an operating table in New York’s Ci…
The Showman and the Slave
The Arts of Deception
These two books are much alike: Both are thick descriptive cultural histories of Barnumesque humbug and even share a common publisher and origins as University of California, Berkeley, dissertations. Still, they are not at all redundant and are worth reading together. James W. Cook's The Arts of Deception draws on the well-known theme of the nineteenth-century urban confidence man to explore commercial exhibits based on outrageous deception. He f…
Theaters of Madness
The Showman and the Slave
From Affect to Disorder
Madness after Virginia Tech
In the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings of 2007, a tendency to view mental illness through the lens of “risk” has been exacerbated on college campuses and beyond. Administrators, counseling centers, law enforcement teams, and policy task forces have encouraged widespread efforts to identify potentially violent students before they act and to intervene with counseling and—in extreme cases—removal from campus. Such procedures and policies have t…
The Cambridge History of the American Novel
"This ambitious literary history traces the American novel from its emergence in the late eighteenth century to its diverse incarnations in the multi-ethnic, multi-media culture of the present day. In a set of original essays by renowned scholars from all over the world, the volume extends important critical debates and frames new ones. Offering new views of American classics, it also breaks new ground to show the role of popular genres - such as…
Sleeping at Walden Pond
This essay explores Henry David Thoreau's Walden in relation to the history of sleep, considered as a medical, biological, social, and spiritual phenomenon. Attention to Thoreau's striving for "awakening" and "alertness" has veiled his running rhetoric of dormancy: scenes and tropes of sleeping, nodding off, sleepwalking, snoring, dreaming, napping, exhaustion, and catalepsy recur throughout the text, while factory bells, the shrieks of trains, c…
Keywords for Disability Studies
Sasha Handley. Sleep in Early Modern England
Scientific and medical research has revealed that sleep is anything but a passive state. Though we may largely lie immobile and insensate at night, our sleeping brains remain hives of activity. Any EEG readout will tell you that the brain is in a state of flux throughout the night, from the long, slow waves of deep sleep to the frantic scribblings etched out during REM sleep. Behind all this electrical activity, sleep busily attends to such diver…
Public Humanities in the Reconstructed University
Colleges and universities that can withstand the fallout of the COVID-19 crisis will need to redouble their efforts to engage students in the kinds of intellectual and social experiences that cannot be attained remotely or in isolation. Public humanities, which promotes collaboration, civic and community engagement, and inter-institutional alliances, can be one such reparative force for the reconstructed university. This essay describes the work …
The Mark of Slavery
In a 2001 essay, Douglas C. Baynton argued that “disability” is a master trope to justify discrimination based on supposed innate bodily and mental differences associated with social hierarchies: racism and sexism are imputations of naturally occurring differences in physical and mental ability (Douglas C. Baynton, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History,” in The New Disability History, ed. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri U…
Art (10 works) · History (8 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Psychology (6 works) · History (4 works) · Political science (4 works) · Race, History, and American Society (4 works) · Art history (3 works) · Computer Science (3 works) · Law (3 works)