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Dr David Bolt

Formerly at Lancaster University

Career Details

Dr. Bolt is the founding editor of Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies (Liverpool University Press). In this capacity he has worked with guest editors Jim Ferris, Michael Davidson, and Lucy Burke on special issues about poetry, dependency, and cognitive impairment.

Dr. Bolt has taught in the English departments of Stoke-on-Trent College and the University of Staffordshire. At the latter he holds a Ph.D. in literary studies that was supervised by Shaun Richards and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board. He also has a B.A. with first-class honours that earned him the Andrew Poynton Memorial Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Literary Studies.

Focusing on nineteenth and twentieth-century literary representations of disability, Dr. Bolt has appeared on the BBC Radio 4 programme You and Yours and written articles for Textual Practice, The Explicator, Disability & Society, The Journal of Visual Impairment and Blindness, The British Journal of Visual Impairment, The Journal of Further and Higher Education and The New Zealand Journal of Disability Studies. Many of these articles have been included in The Disability Archive UK, University of Leeds, and a few have been translated into Spanish for publication in Entre dos mundos: Revista de traducción sobre discapacidad visual. In addition, he gave the opening Plenary presentation at the Inaugural Conference of the Cultural Disability Studies Research Network, Liverpool John Moores University, 2007; he was the guest speaker and a panellist at Cultural Locations of Disability: Situating a Cultural Disability Studies, University of Leeds, 2008; and he co-organised Theorising Culture and Disability: Interdisciplinary Dialogues, Manchester Metropolitan University, 2008.

Affiliated with the Institute for Learning, Dr. Bolt has worked as a sessional lecturer in creative writing at Newcastle-under-Lyme College. He has written a series of short stories for Breath & Shadow: ROSC's Journal of Literature and Disability Culture (one of which was a runner-up for the 2007 Pushcart nominations), hundreds of his lyrics have been set to music and performed at numerous venues in the U.K., and his poetry has appeared in ten anthologies.

Dr. Bolt's work as Honorary Research Fellow will focus on improving the interdisciplinarity of literary, cultural, and disability studies in various ways.

He will be working as editor on a general issue of the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, as well as Petra Kuppers and James Overboe's Deleuze, Disability and Difference and Georgina Kleege's Blindness and Literature. He has also commissioned four special issues on Disabling Postcolonialism, disability and emotion, life writing, and Hardt and Negri, which will be guest edited by Clare Barker and Stuart Murray, Catherine Prendergast and Elizabeth Donaldson, Tom Couser, and Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell respectively.

He will be co-editing a special forum with Dan Goodley, Lucy Burke, Rebecca Lawthom, and Rebecca Mallett on interdisciplinarity for the Review of Disability Studies.

He will be working on various literary disability studies projects, including a study of the representation of disability in Bobbie Ann Mason's short story "Shiloh," the result of which is due to be published in the Midwest Quarterly.