Marion Quirici was the 2015 recipient of the Krause Research Fellowship in Irish Studies. She checks in with us below to offer a reflection on the progress of her project and the relationship between a researcher and her subject of study.

The Krause Research Fellowship in Irish Studies is a fantastic initiative offering support to graduate students who need to travel to do archival research. In 2015 I visited the National Library of Ireland to see the papers of Christy Brown (1932-1981). My dissertation topic was disability and Irish modernism, and Brown was an important figure not only because he was a disabled author, but also for the ways in which he invites us to challenge longstanding tropes of Irishness and disability. Reading his unpublished correspondence, seeing his photographs and paintings, and looking through his library brought me closer to Brown and his family.

I entered the archive hoping to complicate certain received narratives about Brown, especially the clichéd manner in which his work is marketed: as the work of a “brilliant brain trapped inside a damaged body.” It is typical to lionize great writers as geniuses, but in Brown’s case, publicists use his disability to enshrine his work as miraculous. The material in the archive, especially his personal correspondence, humanized Brown for me by revealing not only his extraordinary empathy and his sense of humor, but also his failures. Certainly, many of his letters moved me to tears while others made me laugh. But in aggregate, I observed an unforgiving attitude toward error, either in his own typing (which was usually impeccable), or in the handwriting of his various amanuenses. His exacting approach, coupled with erudite diction that likely eluded his family members, reveals the degree to which Brown wanted to prove himself worthy of respect and love on the basis of a superior quality of mind. It suggests he had internalized the culture’s privileging of ability—mental ability in particular—as the metric by which a person’s value ought to be measured. Ultimately I learned that I too had to be careful not to reduce Brown to something simpler than he was. If Brown was a champion of disability rights, he was not an unproblematic one. Rather than a hero, Brown became for me a fascinating subject to study the impact of history, culture, ideology, and bias against disability, even in the minds of disabled people and would-be activists. And this, I think, makes for more interesting scholarship.