Presented By: Institute for the Humanities
Regions of the Mind: 19th-Century Travel Writing and Neurodiversity
A Hear, Here: Humanities Up Close event with Ittai Orr
With the “Hear, Here” series, we aim to facilitate conversations around new research in the humanities. Faculty fellows at the Institute for the Humanities will discuss a part of their current project in a short talk followed by a Q & A session.
About this talk:
In her 1843 travelogue of the Great Lakes region, American intellectual Margaret Fuller digresses at length about the “Seeress of Prevorst,” whose cognitive disturbances were understood as supernatural visitations. This talk proposes one explanation for Fuller and her contemporaries’ preoccupation with cognition while traveling abroad: biopolitical anxieties collided with their real-world observations, prompting Bostonian intellectuals to question theories of natural inequality in ways that might inform discussions of neurodiversity in the present.
Ittai Orr is a 2025-26 Norman and James Katz Faculty Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities and Assistant Professor; English Language & Literature.
About this talk:
In her 1843 travelogue of the Great Lakes region, American intellectual Margaret Fuller digresses at length about the “Seeress of Prevorst,” whose cognitive disturbances were understood as supernatural visitations. This talk proposes one explanation for Fuller and her contemporaries’ preoccupation with cognition while traveling abroad: biopolitical anxieties collided with their real-world observations, prompting Bostonian intellectuals to question theories of natural inequality in ways that might inform discussions of neurodiversity in the present.
Ittai Orr is a 2025-26 Norman and James Katz Faculty Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities and Assistant Professor; English Language & Literature.
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