The Editorial Team
The Editor
David Bolt
Book Reviews Editor
Clare Barker
Special Guest Editors
Lucy Burke
Michael Davidson
Jim Ferris
Georgina Kleege
Petra Kuppers
Stuart Murray
James Overboe
Editorial Advisers
Ellen Barton
Tammy Berberi
James Berger
Michael Bérubé
Brenda Brueggemann
Johnson Cheu
G. Thomas Couser
Lennard J. Davis
Dr. Elizabeth J. Donaldson
Helen Deutsch
Anne Finger
Maria Frawley
Chris Gabbard
Diane Price Herndl
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson
Martin Halliwell
Martha Stoddard Holmes
Richard A. Ingram
Jennifer James
Alison Kafer
Deborah Kent
Miriamne Ara Krummel
Stephen Kuusisto
Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson
Robert McRuer
Madonne Miner
David Mitchell
Mark Mossman
Felicity A. Nussbaum
Catherine Prendergast
Ato Quayson
Julia Miele Rodas
Irene Rose
Ellen Samuels
Carrie Sandahl
Susan Schweik
David Serlin
Tobin Siebers
Sharon Snyder
James C. Wilson
John Wiltshire
Biographical Notes
Dr. Clare Barker teaches in the School of English at the University of Leeds. Her research focuses on postcolonial and Indigenous literatures, and she is currently working on a monograph, based on her doctoral research, which explores representations of disability in postcolonial literatures. She has published articles on literary disability in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing and the Journal of New Zealand Literature, winning the 2006 JNZL Prize for New Zealand Literary Studies for an article on children with disabilities in Maori fiction.
Dr. Ellen Barton is a Professor in the Linguistics Program and the Composition/Rhetoric Program of the Department of English at Wayne State University. Her research interests include discourse analysis, the analysis of medical discourse, the rhetoric(s) of disability and the development of interdisciplinary research methods. As well as being a co-editor of Discourse Studies in Composition (2002), she has written for Discourse Studies, Discourse and Society, Narrative Inquiry, TEXT, Discourse Processes, Journal of English Linguistics, Journal of Technical and Professional Communication, Written Communication and other journals and edited collections.
Dr. Tammy Berberi is an assistant professor of French at the University of Minnesota, Morris, where she also teaches an on-line Introduction to Disability Studies. She is a co-editor of Worlds Apart? Disability and Foreign Language Learning (forthcoming) and is working on a full-length study of Tristan Corbière.
Dr. James Berger is professor of English at Hofstra University. He is author of After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse (1999) and editor of Helen Keller's The Story of My Life: The Restored Edition (2003). Currently he is writing a book on representations of cognitive and linguistic impairments in modern fiction.
Dr. Michael Bérubé is the Paterno Family Professor in Literature at Pennsylvania State University. As well as being the editor of The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies (2004) and a co-editor of Higher Education Under Fire: Politics, Economics, and the Crisis of the Humanities (1995), he is the author of Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers: Tolson, Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon (1992); Public Access: Literary Theory and American Cultural Politics (1994); The Employment of English: Theory, Jobs, and the Future of Literary Studies (1998); What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?: Classroom Politics and “ Bias” in Higher Education (2006); and Rhetorical Occasions: Essays on Humans and the Humanities (2006). He is also the author of Life As We Know It: A Father, A Family, and an Exceptional Child (1996), which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and was chosen as one of the best books of the year by Maureen Corrigan of National Public Radio.
Dr. David Bolt has taught in the English departments of Staffordshire University and Stoke-on-Trent College. He is at the preliminary stages of a monograph entitled Blindness is a Work of Fiction, which considers the representation of people who are visually impaired in twentieth-century writing. As well as being the founding editor of The Journal of Literary Disability, he is a peer reviewer for The Journal of Visual Impairment and Blindness. He has written dozens of articles, poems and short stories for publications such as Breath & Shadow: ROSC's Journal of Literature and Disability Culture, The Explicator, Between Two Worlds, Disability & Society, The Journal of Visual Impairment and Blindness, The British Journal of Visual Impairment, The Journal of Further and Higher Education and The New Zealand Journal of Disability Studies. A growing selection of his academic writing is available online in The Disability Archive UK.
Dr. Brenda Brueggemann is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Ohio State University, where she has research and teaching interests in deaf and disability studies, community-to-college literacy connections, rhetorical theory and practice, qualitative research methods, pedagogy, and creative non-fiction. She is the author of Lend Me Your Ear: Rhetorical Constructions of Deafness (1999); co-editor of and contributor to Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities (2002); and series editor for "Deaf Lives" (autobiography and biography) for Gallaudet University Press. She has also published material in Rhetoric Review, College English, CCC, JAC, Pedagogy, Prairie Schooner, and Disability Studies Quarterly. She is a recipient of OSU's Kathryn Schoen Award (2000) for Women in Academic Leadership and the OSU Distinguished Diversity Enhancement Award (2001), as well as an Ohio Humanities Council grant, OSU Seed Grant, and Coca-Cola Foundation for Research on Women grant.
Dr. Lucy Burke is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at Manchester Metropolitan University. She is currently completing a monograph on representations of Alzheimer's disease in contemporary literary fiction, poetry and life-writing, a research project that is supported by AHRC funding. She is one of the editors of the Routledge Language and Cultural Theory Reader, and has published on Marie Stopes, Storm Jameson, and Irvine Welsh.
Dr. Johnson Cheu is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric and American Cultures at Michigan State University, where he also serves on the Asian Pacific American Studies Program Advisory Board. His scholarly work has appeared in Disability/Postmodernity: Embodying Disability Theory (2002), Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance (2005) and Relations, Locations, Positions: Composition Theory for Writing Teachers (2006). His poetry and essays have appeared in several journals and anthologies such as Family Matters: Poems of our Families (2005), Screaming Monkeys: Critiques of Asian American Images (2003), Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out (1997), North American Review, The Massachusetts Review and Witness. Recently, he served as the inaugural Fiction/Poetry Editor of Disability Studies Quarterly.
Dr. G. Thomas Couser is Professor of English and Director of Disability Studies at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York. Over the course of his career, he has published four books and nearly 50 articles in the areas of American literature, life writing studies, and disability studies. His most recent books are Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing (1997) and Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing (2004). His work has been assigned at dozens of universities in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Europe, Turkey, Australia, and New Zealand in courses in American Studies, Women's Studies, Life Writing Studies, Disability Studies, Deaf Studies, Rhetoric, Medical Humanities and Political Science.
Dr. Michael Davidson is Vice Chair in the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego, where he is also Professor of American Literature: modern poetry, cultural studies, gender studies and disability studies. He is the author of The Prose of Fact (1981), The Landing of Rochambeau (1985), The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century (1989), Post Hoc (1990) and Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word (1997). He has contributed to books such as Wallace Stevens: The Poetics of Modernism (1985), Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union (1991), Breaking Bounds: Whitman and American Cultural Studies (1996) and Beyond the Boundary: American Identity and Multiculturalism (1999). Some of his shorter works have also been published in American Literary History, Contemporary Literature, O Books and Western American Literature.
Dr. Lennard J. Davis is Professor of English, Professor of Disability and Human Development and Professor of Medical Education at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He is the author of two works on the novel – Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (1983) and Resisting Novels: Fiction and Ideology (1987). His works on disability include the award-winning Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (1995), The Disability Studies Reader (1996/2006) and Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions (2002). As well as publishing his memoir My Sense of Silence (2000), editing his parents’ correspondence Shall I Say a Kiss: The Courtship Letters of a Deaf Couple, 1936-38 (1999), writing numerous articles in The Nation, The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Sun Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education and other journals, he is the author of a novel entitled The Sonnets (2001). He is also the director of Project Biocultures, a co-founder of the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession and an editorial adviser for several academic journals.
Dr. Helen Deutsch is professor of English at UCLA, where she teaches and researches at the crossroads of eighteenth-century studies and disability studies, with particular emphases on questions of authorship, originality, and embodiment across a variety of genres. Her ongoing research questions include the cultural connection between authorship and disability, the interplay between visual and printed cults of authorship, and the formative relationship between bodily difference, literary form, and modern individuality. She is the author of Resemblance and Disgrace: Alexander Pope and the Deformation of Culture (1996), Loving Dr. Johnson (2005), and co-editor of "Defects": Engendering the Modern Body (2000). Among her recent publications are contributions to Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities (the 2002 MLA volume on disability studies), and the special 2005 issue of Prose Studies devoted to disability studies. She is currently working on a new book project on gendered subjectivity, embodiment, and intimate literary forms such as the essay and the verse epistle. She recently led a successful effort to establish an interdisciplinary minor in disability studies at UCLA.
Dr. Elizabeth J. Donaldson is Assistant Professor of English and Chair of the Interdisciplinary Studies Program at New York Institute of Technology, where she teaches courses in disability studies, medical humanities, and American literature. Her current research focuses on mental illness, and her essays on psychiatric disability have appeared in special disability studies issues of the NWSA Journal (National Women’s Studies Association Journal) and Atenea. Her essays on American literature have appeared in the journal Teaching American Literature, and the collections Amy Lowell: American Modern and Sharp Eyes: John Burroughs and American Nature Writing.
Dr. Jim Ferris is a faculty associate in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. A winner of various teaching and poetry awards, he is the author of Facts of Life (2005) and The Hospital Poems (2004). Some of his shorter works have appeared in Georgia Review, Michigan Quarterly Review and Poetry Daily. As well as having experience as a performance artist, director, playwright and actor, he is past president of the Society for Disability Studies. He is currently editing a book on masculinity and disability.
Anne Finger has taught creative writing at Wayne State University in Detroit and the University of Texas at Austin, as well as teaching workshops in the community - as writer-in-residence at the Woman's Building in L.A., at the San Francisco Independent Living Resource Center and in elementary, middle and high schools. She has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, Djerassi, Centrum and Hedgebrook. She is the author of an award-winning collection of short stories, Basic Skills (1988); a novel, Bone Truth (1994); and two memoirs, Elegy for a Disease: A Personal and Cultural History of Polio (2006) and Past Due: A Story of Disability, Pregnancy and Birth (1990). Her shorter works have appeared in numerous journals, including The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, Discourse, Third Coast, Feminist Studies, Thirteenth Moon, Socialist Review, Antioch Review and Ploughshares. She is also a board member of the Society for Disability Studies.
Dr. Maria Frawley is Associate Professor of English at the George Washington University, where she teaches courses in nineteenth-century British literature. She is the author of Invalidism and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2004) and editor of Harriet Martineau's Life in the Sick-Room (2003). Other scholarship includes books on Victorian women travel writers and Anne Brontë, as well as essays on Florence Nightingale, Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Gaskell and others. Currently Vice-President of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, her research interests include the history of print culture and nineteenth-century medicine.
Dr. Chris Gabbard is a Professor of English and Coordinator of the M.A. Program in English at the University of North Florida. He has also taught courses on disability in literature and film at Stanford University. His research and teaching interests include disability studies (with an emphasis on the rhetoric and representation of cognitive impairment), British literature and culture of the long eighteenth century, gender studies, cultural studies, medical discourse and travel writing. His scholarly essays on Early Modern travel writing and on texts by Andrew Marvell, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe and John Dryden have appeared in such journals as SEL, Restoration, ELN and Eighteenth-Century Studies. Currently he is at work on Idiocy and Wit: The Origins of Our Ideas about Mental Disability, a study considering depictions of physiologically based mental impairment (and its metaphorical applications), spanning the period from John Locke's 1690 Essay concerning Human Understanding to William Wordsworth's 1798 poem 'The Idiot Boy'.
Dr. Diane Price Herndl is Associate Professor of Women's Studies and English at Iowa State University. She is the author of Invalid Women: Figuring Feminine Illness in American Fiction and Culture, 1840-1940 (1993) and the co-editor of Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism (1991). She is currently working on two major projects, the McGraw-Hill Anthology of Women Writing in English Worldwide and a study of the representations and politics of breast cancer in contemporary culture, Thinking Through Breast Cancer.
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson is associate professor of Women's Studies at Emory University, Atlanta. She is author of Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Literature and Culture (1997); editor of Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (1996); and co-editor of Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities (2002).
Dr. Martin Halliwell is Professor of American Studies and Director of the Centre for American Studies at the University of Leicester. He specializes in American and transatlantic cultural history and has worked on representations of illness, literary modernism, post-1945 film and visual culture, and the history of science. As well as being a co-author of Critical Humanisms (2003), he is the author of Romantic Science and the Experience of Self (1999); Modernism and Morality (2001), updated as Transatlantic Modernism (2006); Images of Idiocy (2004); The Constant Dialogue: Reinhold Niebuhr and American Intellectual Culture (2005); and American Culture in the 1950s (2007). He is general editor of two series with Edinburgh University Press: Twentieth-Century American Culture and Edinburgh Critical Guides to Literature. He is currently working on a cultural history of medicine and psychiatry in the United States from 1945 to 1970.
Dr. Martha Stoddard Holmes is Associate Professor of Literature and Writing Studies at California State University, San Marcos, and Voluntary Assistant Clinical Professor of Family and Preventive Medicine at the University of California, San Diego. Her scholarship in the cultural history of the body from Victorian culture to the present focuses on disability in literature and culture; pain and opiophobia; aesthetic surgery; and cancer. She is the author of Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture (2004) and several essays in publications such as The Contemporary Theatre Review. As well as coediting The Teacher's Body: Embodiment, Authority, and Identity in the Classroom (2003), a special issue of The Journal of Medical Humanities on Disability: Beyond the Medical Model and a special issue of Literature and Medicine on Narrative, Pain, and Suffering, she is associate editor of Literature and Medicine and The Journal of Medical Humanities. She is also a member of the MLA Executive Committee for the Literature and Science division and was the first moderator of DS-HUM, the disability studies in the humanities listserv.
Dr. Richard A. Ingram is a Senior Research Fellow at the Ryerson-RBC Institute for Disability Studies Research and Education at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. His work on psychiatrization and the critique of narrative has appeared in CTheory and Nasty, and in the following anthologies: Illness in the Academy (2007); Unfitting Stories (2007); and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Health, Illness and Disease (2004). His current research focuses on envisioning futures for psychiatrized and disabled people.
Dr. Jennifer James is an assistant professor of English and Africana Studies at the George Washington University, where she teaches 19th and 20th century African American literature and culture. Her forthcoming book, A Freedom Bought with Blood, explores the relationship between representations of violence to the black body and the politics of citizenship in African American literature from the Civil War through World War II. She served as co-editor for a special issue of MELUS on race, ethnicity and disability in American literature. She has also written articles for The African American Review and a forthcoming anthology of feminist disability studies.
Dr. Alison Kafer is Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies at Southwestern University and a 2006-2007 Ed Roberts Visiting Scholar in Disability Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. As well as writing for The Journal of Women's History, she has published essays in Gendering Disability (2004), Feminist Interventions in Ethics and Politics (2005) and That's Revolting: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation (2004).
Deborah Kent launched her career as an author when she moved to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and wrote her first young-adult novel Belonging (1978), which drew upon her experiences as a blind student in a regular high school. She helped to establish a school for children with special needs in San Miguel, the Centro de Crecimiento. She has now written nearly two dozen young-adult novels, several of which involve teens with disabilities or chronic illnesses. She has also written numerous nonfiction books for young readers, mostly in the area of U.S. history. Her work on disability issues for adult readers has appeared in a number of anthologies, including Bigger than the Sky: Disabled Women Writing about Parenting, edited by Michelle Wates and Rowen Jade (1998); Reflections on a Different Journey, edited by Stanley Klein (2003); and Women with Disabilities: Essays in Psychology, Policy, and Culture, edited by Michelle Fine and Adrienne Asch (1988). She has published articles and reviews in Journal of Visual Impairment and Blindness, Disabled: U.S.A., Ms., Feminist Collections, and Canadian Women's Studies.
Georgina Kleege is Adjunct Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches creative writing and disability studies. She is the author of Home for the Summer (1989), Sight Unseen (1999) and Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller (2006). She has also written short fiction and numerous essays for Raritan, The UNESCO Courier, Ragged Edge, Social Research, The Journal of Visual Culture, Southwest Review and The Yale Review.
Dr. Miriamne Ara Krummel is an Assistant Professor of Medieval Literature at the University of Dayton in Ohio. She has written about her early experiences with multiple sclerosis in ‘Am I MS?’, which was published in Embodied Rhetorics: Disability in Language and Culture (2001). Issues of identity and racism inform all of her work, some of which has been published in The Dayton Jewish Observer, Literature Compass, Midstream and Exemplaria. She is currently revising her book manuscript Legally Absent, Virtually Present: Reading Jewishness in Medieval England, which explores the various ways that representations of Jewishness separate Jewish Otherness from the imaginary Sameness of the sphere of Latin Christendom.
Dr. Petra Kuppers is Associate Professor of English, Theatre and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Chair of The University of Michigan Initiative for Disability Studies. As well as being the editor of various journals and books, she is the author of Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge (2003), The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art (2007), Community Performance: An Introduction (2007) and Disability Culture Poetry: Pleasure and Difference (forthcoming). She has served on the Disability Studies Division Executive Committee of the MLA, as Secretary of Performance Studies international and as President of Art Culture Nature. As an award-winning artist, she has received fellowships and residencies in the U.K., Germany, New Zealand, Australia, the U.S. and beyond. She is the Artistic Director of the Olimpias Performance Research Series and runs The Anarcha Project, which uses performance-based methods to make connections between black and disability cultural history and will be the focus of a national research symposium - funded by the Global Ethnic Literatures Seminar at Michigan (2007).
Stephen Kuusisto holds a dual appointment at the University of Iowa in English where he teaches courses in creative nonfiction and serves as a public humanities scholar in the College of Medicine. A graduate of the Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa and a Fulbright Scholar, he is the author of Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening (2006), the award-winning Planet of the Blind (1998) and a collection of poetry entitled Only Bread, Only Light (2000). His essays and poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and literary journals, including The New York Times Magazine, Poetry and Partisan Review. Moreover, speaking widely on diversity, disability, education and public policy, he has appeared on television and radio programs such as All Things Considered, The Oprah Winfrey Show, Dateline, The Leeza Gibbons Show, The Voice of America and Talk of the Nation. He is currently working on a collection of prose poems for Copper Canyon Press entitled Mornings With Borges as well as a collection of political poems about disability.
Dr. Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson is Professor of English and Director of Composition at Miami University, Ohio. Difference theory connects her scholarly and pedagogical interests - from writing and rhetoric to gender studies and disability studies. She is the author of Writing against the Family: Gender in Lawrence and Joyce (1994); a co-author of From Community to College: Reading and Writing Across Diverse Contexts (1996); and a co-editor of Embodied Rhetorics: Disability in Language and Culture (2001) and Disability and the Teaching of Writing: A Critical Sourcebook (2007). She has also written chapters for many other books and articles for publications such as Rhetoric Review, Journal of Basic Writing, Assessing Writing, College Composition and Communication, Disability Studies Quarterly and JAC: A Quarterly Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Rhetoric, Literacy, Culture, and Politics.
Dr. Robert McRuer is an Associate Professor of English at The George Washington University, where he teaches disability studies, queer studies and critical theory. He is the author of Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (2006) and The Queer Renaissance: Contemporary American Literature and the Reinvention of Lesbian and Gay Identities (2007). His essays have appeared in numerous journals, including Genders, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Radical History Review, The Journal of Medical Humanities and The Public Historian. He is also a co-editor of Desiring Disability: Queer Theory Meets Disability Studies (2003).
Dr. Madonne Miner is Dean of the College of Arts & Humanities at Weber State University in Ogden, UT. Her academic background is in American Literature, Popular Culture, and Women's Studies. She teaches and does research in these three areas, incorporating materials that raise questions about disability, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, class, and gender. She has published a book, Insatiable Appetites: Twentieth-Century American Women's Bestsellers (1984), as well as essays on authors from Horatio Alger and Kate Chopin to Shakespeare, Jack London, Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison.
Dr. David Mitchell is Executive Director of the Institute on Disabilities and an Associate Professor in the College of Education at Temple University. He has co-authored three books: The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability (1997), Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (2000), and Cultural Locations of Disability (2006). In addition to authoring numerous journal articles he is senior editor of the five volume Encyclopedia of Disability (2006) and co-curator of the Chicago Disability History Exhibit. He played a key role in the founding of the Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession and the Disability Studies Discussion Group for the Modern Languages Association. As a visual artist he has also produced and edited four award winning documentary films on disability history, literature, art, and culture, and was a co-founder of the independent disability film company, Brace Yourselves Productions. He is currently at work on several new projects including a film on the history of disability education in the United States.
Dr. Mark Mossman is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in English at Western Illinois University in Macomb, Illinois. He teaches nineteenth-Century British Literature and Disability Studies. He has had essays published in such journals as College English, Nineteenth-Century Feminisms, Postmodern Culture, Post Identity, and European Romantic Review; on such figures as Mary Shelley, Sydney Owenson, Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Lamb, Thomas Hardy, and W. B. Yeats; and on such issues as autobiography and disability, the representation of the physical difference in the Nineteenth Century, the dynamics of disability in the postmodern University classroom, and the dynamics of disability and "modern" Ireland. He is currently at work on a project that investigates how a disability framework can be read into 19th century Irish cultural practice. This work has led to research visits to Notre Dame as well as The National Archives and The National Library in Dublin, Ireland. He is also the co-editor for the summer 2008 issue of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies.
Dr. Stuart Murray is a Senior Lecturer in the School of English at the University of Leeds. His research interests are in the fields of Postcolonial Literatures and the representation of cognitive impairment, especially autism. He is currently editing a series of books for Liverpool University Press - Representations: Disability, Health and Culture - and working on his own study for the series: Representing Autism: Culture, Narrative, Fascination. As well as being the author of Never a Soul at Home: New Zealand Literary Nationalism and the 1930s (1998), he has written for journals such as Literature and Medicine, South Asian Review, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Journal of New Zealand Literature and The Review of Contemporary Fiction. He has also edited and co-edited various books, including New Zealand Filmmakers (2006); Contemporary New Zealand Cinema (2006); and Not On Any Map: Essays on Postcoloniality and Cultural Nationalism (1997).
Felicity A. Nussbaum, Professor of English at the University of CaliforniaLos Angeles, has also taught at Syracuse University. She is the author most recently of The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (2003). She is also a co-editor of "Defects": Engendering the Modern Body (2000). She has held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Stanford Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Henry E. Huntington Library and the Rockefeller Foundation. In Los Angeles she serves on the board for QualKare, an agency that provides in-home supportive services to disabled people, and has been active in the disability rights movement for several decades. She is working with a group at UCLA to establish a minor in disability studies.
Dr. James Overboe is Assistant Professor in Sociology at Wilfrid Laurier University. Beginning with his initial publication in 1999, Difference in Itself: Validating Disabled People's Lived Experience, and continuing with his latest publications in 2007 Disability and Genetics: Affirming the Bare Life (the State of Exception), Ableist Limits on Self-Narration: The Concept of Post-Personhood, Vitalism: Subjectivity Exceeding Racism, Sexism, and (Psychiatric) Ableism he affirms disabled expressions of life through alterity and singularities. While at Laurier he has taught social theory as well as developing and teaching two courses from a Disability Studies perspective - Bodies, Bioethics, and Boundaries: Geneticism in the 21st Century; and A Critical Analysis of Disability: Beyond Abnormality and Normality.
Catherine Prendergast is Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and a Fulbright scholar. She is the author of Literacy and Racial Justice (2003), a winner of awards from the MLA; the Conference on College Composition and Communication; and the Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition. She has published essays in edited collections, notably Embodied Rhetorics: Disability in Language and Culture (2001), and in numerous journals including Harvard Educational Review, Rhetoric Review, Social Text and Written Communication. Her work in progress, Of Sound Mind, examines mental disability and self-representation.
Dr. Ato Quayson is Professor of English and Director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing (1997); Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice or Process? (2000); and Calibrations: Reading for the Social (2003). He also wrote the Introduction and Notes to the Penguin Classics edition of Nelson Mandela's No Easy Walk to Freedom (2002) and is a coauthor of Relocating Postcolonialism (2002). His forthcoming book is Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation.
Dr. Julia Miele Rodas is an assistant professor at CUNY's Bronx Community College, New York. She specializes in utopian fiction, disability studies and Victorian literature. Her work has appeared in The Oxford Readers’ Companion to Trollope, Dickens Studies Annual, the Princeton University Library Chronicle and The Explicator.
Irene Rose is a sessional lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Liverpool John Moores University. She has published on female masculinity and the poetry of Jackie Kay in Daniel Lea and Berthold SCHOENE's Posting the Male: Masculinities in Post-war and Contemporary British Literature (2003). Her main interest is in the representation of autism, about which she has been interviewed in The Guardian and on the BBC Radio 4 programme Woman's Hour. Her current research at Manchester University focuses on autist autobiography, she is a panel chair at the SAMLA Autism Texts strand, Atlanta, 2007, and is the editor of a special issue of Diegesis: Journal of the Association for Research in Popular Fictions on Autism and Popular Narrative (2008). She is also a co-founder of the Cultural Disability Studies Research Network, the Inaugural Conference of which was hosted by Liverpool John Moores University and launched JLD in 2007.
Dr. Ellen Samuels is a 2006-2007 Ed Roberts Postdoctoral Fellow in Disability Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and in 2007 will begin a position as assistant professor of Women's Studies and English literature at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her scholarly work appears in many journals and anthologies, including GLQ: Gay/Lesbian Quarterly, Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, the National Women's Studies Association Journal, MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States, Restricted Access: Lesbians on Disability and The Sage Encyclopedia of Disability. She is the author of a poetry collection, December Morning (2004) and a co-editor of the multi-award-winning anthology Out of the Ordinary: Essays on Growing Up with Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Parents (2000). She is also a member of the MLA Executive Committee for the Disability Studies Division.
Dr. Carrie Sandahl is an Associate Professor at Florida State University’s School of Theatre. Her research and creative activity focus on disability and gender identities in live performance, including theatre, dance and performance art. Having published in a variety of journals, such as Theatre Journal, Theatre Topics, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Disability Studies Quarterly, Contemporary Theatre Review, Gay and Lesbian Quarterly and PMLA, she is currently working on a book entitled Americans With Disability Act: Disability Identity and Performance Since the Civil Rights Era. She is also a co-Investigator on a three-year study of Careers in the Arts for People with Disabilities, which is funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. In addition, as well as collaborating in the award-winning video short The Scary Lewis Yell-A-Thon, which has played at film festivals internationally and aired on television stations in Canada and Australia, she has participated in the Disability Theatre Initiative, a New York City advocacy group for the inclusion of disabled performers in theatre, television and film.
Dr. Susan Schweik is an Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is co-director of both the Disability Studies program and the Ed Roberts Post-Doctoral Fellowship program. She is the author of A Gulf So Deeply Cut: American Women Poets and the Second World War (1991) and The American Ugly Laws (forthcoming) – the first scholarly history and extended analysis of U.S. laws prohibiting “any person, who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or deformed in any way, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object” from “expos[ing] himself to public view”. She has also written for numerous journals, including Narrative, Critical Inquiry and Public Culture.
Dr. David Serlin is an associate professor of communication and sciences studies, and affiliated faculty in critical gender studies, at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Replaceable You: Engineering the Body in Postwar America (2004), which was awarded the 2005 Alan Bray Book Prize by the MLA; and a co-editor of two anthologies – namely, Policing Public Sex: Queer Politics and the Future of AIDS Activism (1996) and Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics (2002). As well as being the editor of Imagining Illness: Public Health and Visual Culture (forthcoming), he is currently at work on a book-length project about disability, visuality and modern architecture.
Tobin Siebers is V. L. Parrington Collegiate Professor, Professor of English and Art and Design, and Director of the Program in Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. He has been a fellow of the Michigan Society of Fellows and the John Simon Memorial Guggenheim Foundation, as well as a Visiting Scholar at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris. His major publications include The Mirror of Medusa (1983), The Romantic Fantastic (1984), The Ethics of Criticism (1988), Morals and Stories (1992), Cold War Criticism and the Politics of Skepticism (1993), The Subject and Other Subjects: On Ethical, Aesthetic, and Political Identity (1998) and Among Men (1999). He is also the editor of Religion and the Authority of the Past (1993), Heterotopia: Postmodern Utopia and the Body Politic (1994) and The Body Aesthetic: From Fine Art to Body Modification (2000). His shorter works have been published in numerous journals, including American Literary History, Cultural Critique, Literature and Medicine, Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, Michigan Quarterly Review, PMLA and the MLA volume on disability studies.
Dr. Sharon Snyder is Assistant Professor in the Department of Disability and Human Development at the University of Illinois, Chicago, where she is also Program Director of the Disability and Cultural Studies Unit. As well as being a coauthor of Cultural Locations of Disability (2006) and Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (2001), coediter of Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities (2002) and The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability (1997), she is the author of numerous essays on disability theory, culture and representational history that have been published widely and translated for many professional journals. The founder of Brace Yourselves Productions, she is also an award-winning filmmaker whose work includes Self-Preservation: the Art of Riva Lehrer (2004), Disability Takes on the Arts (2005), A World Without Bodies (2002) and Vital Signs: Crip Culture Talks Back (1996). She is a founding member of the MLA’s Committee on Disability Issues, a key organizer of the MLA’s Disability Studies Discussion Group and has served as director for the Society for Disability Studies.
Dr. James C. Wilson is Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati. His research fields include American literature, cultural studies and disability studies. As well as co-editing Embodied Rhetorics: Disability in Language and Culture (2001), he is the author of Vietnam in Prose and Film (1983), John Reed for the Masses (1987) and The Hawthorne and Melville Friendship (1990). A Contributing Editor of The Heath Anthology of American Literature, he has articles in ESQ, ATQ and Melville Society Extracts. Some of his more recent work appears in Cultural Critique, Rhetoric Review, Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities (2002) and The Disability Studies Reader (2006).
Dr. John Wiltshire is Professor of English at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, where he has been teaching for over thirty years. Among his books are Samuel Johnson and the Medical World: the Doctor and the patient (1991), Jane Austen and the Body: ‘the picture of health’ (1992) – both reissued in paperback in 2006 - and Recreating Jane Austen (2001). He has also published an edition of Austen’s most ambitious novel, Mansfield Park, in the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen (2005). He has researched and written extensively in the fields of medicine, nursing, ethics and narrative. His work in health-care focuses on both informal and formal narratives of embodiment. His collaborative works include Drugs in the Health Marketplace (1995) and Sexuality and Medicine (2005), as well as various articles and chapters on aspects of nursing, narrative and qualitative research. In 2006 he addressed the British Society for Medical Humanities in London and the Jane Austen Society of North America in Tucson, Arizona. He is currently working on a history of Western medicine from the viewpoint of the patient, and preparing a volume on Dr. Johnson for the Helm Information series, Icons of Modern Culture.
Copy Editors
Stephen Bolt has a B.A. in Politics and Economics at Goldsmiths University, London. As well as being a copy editor for the journal, he is the graphic designer.
Jane Goetzee has a M.A. and a B.A. in fine art at the University of Staffordshire. She is an artist and a poet.
Editor, Dr. David Bolt |
Book Reviews Editor, Dr. Clare Barker
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