


ABOUT JOHN
John Gulledge is a Ph.D. candidate at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. He specializes in early modern performance, Critical Disability Studies, and the history of emotions, especially laughter and the affect of wonder. Broadly, his work questions the ways in which aesthetic performance served as a blueprint for everyday life and shaped modern categories of identity. His dissertation, titled "Prosthetic Laughter: Feeling Disability Performance in Early Modern England," argues that affective encounters with bodymind difference in the early modern period reveal aesthetic and culturally significant debts owed to disability.
John is a current fellow at the Emory Woodruff Library and Writing Center, where he works in the division of Instruction and Engagement. He teaches Introduction to Humanities and writing at Atlanta Technical College and has recently taught composition and literature courses at Emory University. Formerly, he was the graduate fellow for Emory's Disability Studies Initiative, blog editor for Emory's Experimental Ethnography working group, and recipient of a Humanities Ph.D. Intervention Grant funded by the Mellon Foundation. In 2021-2022, he was a fellow at The Hatchery, Emory's center for innovation, where he worked with colleagues on sustainable funding for community-engaged projects. He has also helped teach classes in the departments of Classics and Neuroscience & Behavioral Biology (NBB) at Emory.
John lives in Decatur, GA with his puppy, "Kit" Marlowe, paints miniatures when not reading or writing, and is most at home among things that go bump in the night. He may be reached via email at john.wayne.gulledge [at] emory [dot] edu or through this site.
The bottom line is this: You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world. In some way, your aspirations and concern for a single man in fact do begin to change the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person looks or people look at reality, then you can change it.
-James Baldwin, 1979
