In Memory of Nancy L. Eiesland

Nancy L. Eielsand, a distinguished and beloved Professor of Sociology of Religion and Disability Studies at Emory University, has died.  She was the first faculty member I met when I first visited Emory University in Atlanta exploring their doctoral program in religion.  She became an important mentor, teacher, and friend. I studied with her, co-taught courses with her, and served as a research assistant on a major research project she directed.  She was a reader and key advisor on my dissertation project, and a good conversation partner over the years on my ongoing research and writing.  We shared ambition (both of us had our master's theses published, a mark of the hyper-active academic) tempored by a desire to be good parents and spouses.  I got the word from numerous places last night that after her final struggle with cancer (diagnosed in late November) she died peacefully surrounded by family yesterday morning.  

Nancy had been extremely ill over the past year and a half, unable to attend a conference I hosted at Yale in September 2007 and, as I learned, unable even to carry on at Emory.  After a medical leave including a long hospitalization, she returned to her duties last summer.  I corresponded with her in the fall and her good spirits were palpable. It was not a month later when I learned, via Don Saliers, another of my teachers from Emory, that Nancy had been diagnosed with cancer.  Here is a short excerpt from a piece on disability and pain last Spring as she returned to full-time teaching.

For the last 18 months, I’ve been in the fight of my life to best a drug-resistant staph infection that had invaded my spine — where I had years before had metal implanted to keep me upright. Colleagues and acquaintances who knew my status as a person with a disability would often say, “I don’t think of you having a disability.” Of course, their misguided compliments gave me fodder for the truth-telling that they (like many) participated in the misapprehension that being capable and intelligent was incompatible with being a person with a disability. But over time, I have realized that I was a collaborator in those stories; many people trotted out this old saw because I didn’t think of myself as a person with a disability, though I had long identified as one. I had learned to overachieve, so that my competence was unassailable and my independence was a marker of a true blue American. As a toddler, I began the operations that were to eliminate my birth defect. But soon the one constant in my body was the register of pain. In the effort to first quantify and then control pain, the medical world created the insidious pain faces scale. If I’m an 8 am I obliged to drum up tears to begin to approach the picture to be truly convincing? I could never fix a number to pain, nor did I do well with the multiple choice approach. I always imagine a Freddy Krueger slasher scene during which he might stop and ask me if I’d prefer to be stabbed, burned or beaten. 

 Read the rest here.

Her books:

A Particular Place: Urban Restructuring and Religious Ecology in a Southern Exurb (Rutgers University Press, 2000)

Human Disability and the Service of God (Abingdon Press, 1998), co-editor with Don Saliers

Contemporary American Religion: An Ethnographic Reader (AltaMira Press, 1997), co-editor with Penny Edgill

The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability (Abingdon Press, 1994)

Anon, and peace,

Chris

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