“CALIBRATION: The Science of Deafness in Interwar Britain”
Jaipreet Virdi (University of Delaware)
Jaipreet Virdi is a historian of medicine, technology and disability. Her research and teaching interests include the history of medicine, the history of science, disability history, disability technologies and material/visual culture studies. She received her Ph.D. from the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto (2014).
Dr. Virdi’s first book, Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History (University of Chicago Press, 2020), rethinks how therapeutic negotiation and the influence of pseudo-medicine shaped what it meant to be a “normal” deaf citizen in American history. Examining how deaf/deafened individuals attempted to amplify their hearing through various types of surgical, proprietary and/or technological “deafness cures,” the book charts the dissemination of ideas about hearing loss from beyond medical elites to popular culture and the popular imagination. Hearing Happiness received the British Society for the History of Science’s Hughes Prize and the American Association for the History of Medicine’s Welch Medal.