Neurodivergent Readings of the Old Norse Lives of St. Þorlákr
Part of the Neurodiversity Network events
Wednesday 6 May 2026, 12.30pm - 3pm
Learning Centre, Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities
Speaker: Professor Natalie Van Deusen, Henry Cabot and Linnea Lodge Scandinavian Professor, University of Alberta
All welcome
Natalie Van Deusen is the Henry Cabot and Linnea Lodge Scandinavian Professor at the University of Alberta. She is a specialist in Old Norse and Early Modern Icelandic paleography and philology, hagiography, and religious literature, with a focus on women and gender. She is also a neurodivergent scholar who both lives with disability and studies how disability was constructed, experienced, and understood in medieval Nordic society.
In this lecture, she examines how neurodivergent identity and scholarly positionality shape the interpretation of disability in medieval hagiographic literature. Drawing on methodologies from literary neurodiversity and disability studies, she offers a neurodivergent reading of the Old Norse lives of St. Þorlákr of Skálholt, the patron saint of Iceland and, according to the American-based organization Autism Consecrated, the patron saint of autism.
In its reading of St. Þorlákr and his sacred biography through a neurodivergent lens, the lecture foregrounds alternative modes of perception, cognition, and social engagement that are often overlooked in traditional readings of medieval texts. This approach reveals more nuanced and complex representations of disability, sanctity, and difference in Old Norse literature, while also demonstrating the value of neurodivergent methodologies for literary scholarship more broadly.
