Window Shopping with Helen Keller: Architecture and Disability in Modern Culture
David Serlin
University of California, San Diego20.10.2026, 18:30
Conference Room of the Center for Urban History
We invite you to the public talk with David Serlin about his recent book, Window Shopping with Helen Keller: Architecture and Disability in Modern Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2025).
The book recovers a series of influential historical moments in the late nineteenth century and early to mid-twentieth century when architects and designers engaged with the embodied experiences of disabled people, long before the concepts of "access" or "accommodation" became part of the common vocabulary of architects or urban planners. In terms of method, the book combines the tools and insights of architecture and design history, disability studies, urban history, visual and material culture studies, and histories of the senses.
This talk will provide an overview of the book's four chapters and epilogue, which include examples from the lives of Joseph Merrick (a/k/a "The Elephant Man") in Victorian London and Helen Keller in New York City and Paris; examples of buildings and design projects in the 1930s made by and for disabled people under President Franklin Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration; and the architect Stanley Tigerman’s design in the 1970s for a public library in Chicago for blind and disabled users. By putting disabled people and their experiences at the generative center of modern culture, these case studies challenge conventional definitions for what it has meant to be "urban" and "modern."
This lecture continues the public series "Let's Have a City," which offers different views and approaches to the study of the modern city.
David Serlin
University of California, San DiegoProfessor of Communication at the University of California, San Diego, USA. He is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, which awarded him the Rome Prize in Architecture. He is the author or editor of many books including Replaceable You: Engineering the Body in Postwar America (University of Chicago Press, 2004), Imagining Illness: Public Health and Visual Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), Keywords for Disability Studies (NYU Press, 2015), and Window Shopping with Helen Keller: Architecture and Disability in Modern Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2025). He also writes books for children. He is the author of the New York Times-bestselling Baby Monkey, Private Eye (Scholastic Press, 2018) which was illustrated by his husband, Brian Selznick, and has been translated into over ten languages.
Credits
Cover Image: Cover of the Window Shopping with Helen Keller: Architecture and Disability in Modern Culture
Speakers photo: Catherine Opie