John Gulledge is an Assistant Professor of English at Wittenberg University. He specializes in early modern literature, 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 current book project argues that affective encounters with bodymind difference in the early modern period reveal aesthetic and culturally significant debts owed to disability.
At Wittenberg, John teaches classes on British literature before 1800, disability studies, affect theory, and health humanities. Prior to joining Wittenberg, he was a Woodruff Library Fellow at Emory University, where he received his Ph.D. in English. 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 Springfield, OH with his dog, "Kit" Marlowe, paints miniatures when not reading or writing, and enjoys board games with friends and family. He may be reached via email at gulledgej [at] witteneber [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
