Norman and James Katz Faculty Fellow
About
“Before IQ: The Construction of Cognitive Difference in Antebellum American Literature”
Before IQ traces how European, African, and Indigenous American paradigms converged in popular genres like traditional stories, novels, travelogues, and sermons, to generate models of cognition and mental life that differ greatly from the hereditarian and fixed scale of intelligence. Because many of these models celebrate abilities like communal care, environmental awareness, and practical know-how as opposed to competition, individualism, and mastery, they invite more capacious approaches to neurodivergence than IQ and the eugenics movement did in the next century, and as this book suggests, we have much to learn from them today.
Ittai Orr is an Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature.
