Courtney Greer-Soliday (f.k.a. Gragson)

Research Interests:   Disability history; history of the body; early modern science; history of medicine; women and gender studies; science and religion; history of the book.

Courtney is broadly interested in early modern disability and medicine. Her Master’s thesis focused on an underutilized religious commentary written by a blind woman in 16th century Germany. The main purpose of her thesis was to better understand the gendered, disabled, and religious aspects of the text, as well as the society and historical world from which it originated. The main avenues through which this was achieved was via interdisciplinary methodologies, literature analysis, and case studies of the known female owners, handlers, circulators, and (re)publishers of the text. This thesis offered important insights into sixteenth and seventeenth-century gender, disability, and popular religion in the Lower Saxony region of Germany, as well as new insights into the use of semi-autobiographical sources in premodern disability studies.

Courtney is interested in further exploring disability and the body in early modern history utilizing similar semi-autobiographicalsources. She aims to critically study the intersection of disability, gender, race, and class in the early modern world, as well as the possible influences on and regional differences in healing practices/processes, social care networks, accommodation practices, and impairment aids.

Presentation:

“Inheriting a ‘Little Book of Comfort’: The Case of a Disabled Text and its Female Network of Book Ownership in Early Modern Germany”, Self-Fashioning Corporeal Diversity. Sixteenth Century Society & Conference 2025, Portland, OR. 

Previous Degrees:

B.A., History, Languages & Cultures, Texas Tech University;
M.A., History, Texas Tech University