Rachel Adams
Professor, Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
Rachel Adams is the director of the “Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics and Culture.” She is Professor of English and American Studies at Columbia University, where she specializes in 19th- and 20th-century literatures of the United States and the Americas, media studies, theories of race, gender, and sexuality, medical humanities and disability studies.
Rachel Adams
Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
Rachel Adams is the director of the “Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics and Culture.” She is Professor of English and American Studies at Columbia University, where she specializes in 19th- and 20th-century literatures of the United States and the Americas, media studies, theories of race, gender, and sexuality, medical humanities and disability studies. Her most recent book is Raising Henry: A Memoir of Motherhood, Disability, and Discovery, published by Yale University Press in 2013. She is the author of Continental Divides: Remapping the Cultures of North America (University of Chicago Press, 2009) and Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination (University of Chicago Press, 2001). She is co-editor (with David Savran) of The Masculinity Studies Reader (Blackwell Press, 2001) and (with Sarah Casteel) a special issue of Comparative American Literature on "Canada and the Americas." She is editor of a critical edition of Kate Chopin's The Awakening (Fine Publications, 2002). Her articles have appeared in journals such as American Literature, American Literary History, American Quarterly, Minnesota Review, Camera Obscura, GLQ, Signs, Yale Journal of Criticism and Twentieth-Century Literature. She has also written for the The New York Times, Salon, Chronicle of Higher Education, Gastronomica, and the Times of London and blogs for The Huffington Post. In 2010, she won the Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award.
Working Group Affiliations
Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics and Culture, Project Director
The Future of Disability Studies, Project Director
Margaret Araneo-Reddy
Fellow, Theater, Brooklyn College
Margaret Araneo-Reddy is a New York-based scholar and theatre artist. She is currently a doctoral candidate at the Graduate Center, City University of New York and an Instructor of Drama at New York University. Her current research focuses on the intersection of neuropsychology and popular performance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Using a cultural model of disability, Margaret examines the ways the small forms of cabaret and vaudeville (in Paris and New York respectively) both represent and embody neurological diversity in performance.
Margaret Araneo-Reddy
Adjunct Assistant Professor of Theater, Brooklyn College
Margaret Araneo-Reddy is a New York-based scholar and theatre artist. She is currently a doctoral candidate at the Graduate Center, City University of New York and an Instructor of Drama at New York University. Her current research focuses on the intersection of neuropsychology and popular performance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Using a cultural model of disability, Margaret examines the ways the small forms of cabaret and vaudeville (in Paris and New York respectively) both represent and embody neurological diversity in performance. Ultimately, this research will be included in a larger project on modernist performance and corporeal difference—one that looks to embodied experiences of disability and impairment to challenge and expand existing models of modernism and modernity.
Working Group Affiliation
Christopher Baswell
Professor, Department of English, Barnard College
Professor Baswell rejoins the faculty at Barnard and Columbia after a period as Professor of English and Associate Director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at UCLA, 2001-2008. Baswell’s earliest research was in the reception and transformation of classical literature, especially narratives of empire and dynastic foundation, in the vernacular cultures of the European Middle Ages. He has approached these issues through the optic of original manuscripts, and in the light of the multilingualism of medieval France and England.
Christopher Baswell
Anne Whitney Olin Professor of English, Barnard College
Professor Baswell rejoins the faculty at Barnard and Columbia after a period as Professor of English and Associate Director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at UCLA, 2001-2008. Baswell’s earliest research was in the reception and transformation of classical literature, especially narratives of empire and dynastic foundation, in the vernacular cultures of the European Middle Ages. He has approached these issues through the optic of original manuscripts, and in the light of the multilingualism of medieval France and England. Some of this research resulted in Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring the Aeneid from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer (Cambridge UP 1995), which won the 1998 Beatrice White Prize of the English Association. Further work on foundation narratives has led to articles and a forthcoming monograph on narratives of female foundation and their challenge to a dominant tradition of founding fathers. Baswell is also at work on new research on the cultural imagination of disability in the Middle Ages. He has held fellowships from the NEH, the ACLS, the National Humanities Center, and the Institute for Advanced Study. Baswell is co-editor of the medieval volume of the Longman Anthology of British Literature. He is General Editor of the series Cursor Mundi: Viator Studies of the Medieval and Early Modern World (Brepols).
Working Group Affiliation
James Berger
Fellow, American Studies and English, Yale University
James Berger is Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English at Yale University. He is author of After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse and editor of Helen Keller's The Story of My Life: The Restored Edition. He is currently completing The Disarticulate: Language, Impairment, and the Narratives of Modernity, to be published by New York University Press.
James Berger
Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English, Yale University
James Berger is Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English at Yale University. He is author of After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse and editor of Helen Keller's The Story of My Life: The Restored Edition. He is currently completing The Disarticulate: Language, Impairment, and the Narratives of Modernity, to be published by New York University Press.
Working Group Affiliation
Nicki Berger
Doctoral Student, Oral History, Columbia University
Nicki Pombier Berger is an oral historian, educator, and interdisciplinary artist.
Nicki is on the faculty at The New School College of Performing Arts, where she teaches in the Drama BFA program. In collaboration with playwright Suli Holum, she is currently working as dramaturg on THE BAKKEN, an investigation of the Bakken shale, a rock formation roughly 350 million years old sitting deep below the surface of North Dakota.
Nicki Berger
Oral History Masters of Arts Program, Columbia University
Nicki Pombier Berger is an oral historian, educator, and interdisciplinary artist.
Nicki is on the faculty at The New School College of Performing Arts, where she teaches in the Drama BFA program. In collaboration with playwright Suli Holum, she is currently working as dramaturg on THE BAKKEN, an investigation of the Bakken shale, a rock formation roughly 350 million years old sitting deep below the surface of North Dakota.
She is the Founding Editor of Underwater New York, an arts project of work inspired by the waterways of New York City. As an oral historian, Nicki has created and curated multimedia exhibits online and in public spaces, and designed and produced educational and experimental films. Presently, she is an Artist Resident for DISCOVERING SELINSGROVE, a public history pilot, using an arts- and oral history-based approach to document first-person experiences of institutionalization, run by The Institute on Disabilities at Temple University and funded by the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage. From 2014-2015, she worked on A Fierce Kind of Love, The Institute on Disabilities at Temple’s multifaceted arts-based project on the intellectual disability rights movement in Pennsylvania, for which Nicki co-curated content for a multimedia exhibit online and in the rotunda of the Pennsylvania State Capitol and Philadelphia’s City Hall (Here. Stories from Selinsgrove Center and KenCrest Services).
In 2015, she produced An Accidental Documentary, an experimental film drawing on personal and archival oral histories to teach a history of intellectual disability. From 2013-2104, she designed and produced the TILL Living Legacy Project, an educational film designed to engage human services staff in rethinking the complexity and humanity of people with intellectual disabilities, which won the 2015 Innovation Award from the Massachusetts Council of Human Service Providers. In 2013, she produced an online multimedia collection of stories from self-advocates with Down syndrome, “Nothing About Us Without Us.” From 2010-2013, she led several community engagement efforts at the national nonprofit organization, StoryCorps. From 2015-2017, she was a Research Fellow on the Robert Rauschenberg Oral History Project.
Nicki has a Master of Arts in Oral History from Columbia University (2013), a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College (2009), and a Bachelor of Science in the Foreign Service from Georgetown University (2001).
Working Group Affiliation
Liz Bowen
PhD Student, English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
Liz Bowen is a Ph.D. candidate in English and comparative literature who works at the intersections of 20th and 21st century American literature, disability studies, and critical animal studies. Her dissertation, “Animal Abilities: Disability, Species Difference, and Aesthetic Innovation in the Long 20th Century,” traces the intertwined deployments of disability, animality, and cognitive otherness as sites for literary experimentation, from Faulkner to the Harlem Renaissance to contemporary poetics.
Liz Bowen
PhD Student, Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
Liz Bowen is a Ph.D. candidate in English and comparative literature who works at the intersections of 20th and 21st century American literature, disability studies, and critical animal studies. Her dissertation, “Animal Abilities: Disability, Species Difference, and Aesthetic Innovation in the Long 20th Century,” traces the intertwined deployments of disability, animality, and cognitive otherness as sites for literary experimentation, from Faulkner to the Harlem Renaissance to contemporary poetics. She has published critical reviews in The Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies and Humanimalia: A Journal of Human/Animal Interface Studies, and her essay “On Outcast Women, Dog Love, and Abjection between Species” will be included in the edited collection Animaladies, forthcoming from Bloomsbury. Liz has been the graduate organizer for Columbia’s University Seminar on Disability, Culture, and Society for the past three years, and she is also pursuing a certificate in feminist scholarship from the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She has been the instructor of record for both writing composition and literary studies courses, including an upper-level seminar of her own design called Animal Modernisms.
Liz is also a widely published poet and poetry critic. Her first full-length poetry collection, Sugarblood, was published by Metatron Press in 2017, and her chapbook Compassion Fountain is forthcoming from Hyacinth Girl Press in 2018. Her poems and essays have appeared in Boston Review, The Wanderer, Dream Pop Press, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Atlas Review, and elsewhere. She is also on the poetry staff at Anomaly magazine. For further publications, press, and CV, please visit her website at liz-bowen.com.
Working Group Affiliation
Sarah Chinn
Fellow, English, Hunter College
Sarah Chinn teaches nineteenth century literature at Hunter College, CUNY. Her work primarily explores questions of race, embodiment, sexuality, and gender in U.S. literature and culture, particularly in the 19th century. She is the author of Technology and the Logic of American Racism: A Cultural History of the Body as Evidence (Continuum, 2000) and The Invention of Modern Adolescence: Children of Immigrants in Turn-of-the-Century America (Rutgers University Press, 2008).
Sarah Chinn
Associate Professor of English, Hunter College, CUNY
Sarah Chinn teaches nineteenth century literature at Hunter College, CUNY. Her work primarily explores questions of race, embodiment, sexuality, and gender in U.S. literature and culture, particularly in the 19th century. She is the author of Technology and the Logic of American Racism: A Cultural History of the Body as Evidence (Continuum, 2000) and The Invention of Modern Adolescence: Children of Immigrants in Turn-of-the-Century America (Rutgers University Press, 2008). She is currently working on two book-length projects: Spectacular Men: Race, Gender, and Nation on the Early American Stage, and Feeling Our Way: The Ethics of Lesbian Writing.
Working Group Affiliation
G. Thomas Couser
Fellow, Disability Studies, Hofstra University
G. Thomas Couser retired in 2011 from Hofstra University, where he was a professor of English and founding director of the Disability Studies Program.
G. Thomas Couser
Professor Emeritus of English and Founding Director, Disability Studies Program, Hofstra University
G. Thomas Couser retired in 2011 from Hofstra University, where he was a professor of English and founding director of the Disability Studies Program. He is the author of American Autobiography: The Prophetic Mode (Massachusetts, 1979), Altered Egos: Authority in American Autobiography (Oxford, 1989), Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing (Wisconsin, 1997), Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing (Cornell, 2004), and Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing (Michigan, 2009), as well as about fifty articles or book chapters. His latest book, Memoir: An Introduction, will be published by Oxford University Press in November 2011. He is currently writing a book about contemporary American “patriography” (memoirs of fathers by sons and daughters) and a memoir of his own father.
Working Group Affiliation
Elizabeth J. Donaldson
Fellow, English, New York Institute of Technology
Elizabeth J. Donaldson is Associate Professor of English at New York Institute of Technology, where she teaches courses in American literature, writing, and medical humanities. She has published essays on mental illness in film, antipsychiatry in Lauren Slater’s memoirs, physiognomy and madness in Jane Eyre, teaching Melville online, and the poetry of Amy Lowell, among other subjects. She is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disabilities Studies and is co-editor (with Catherine J.
Elizabeth J. Donaldson
Associate Professor of English, New York Institute of Technology
Elizabeth J. Donaldson is Associate Professor of English at New York Institute of Technology, where she teaches courses in American literature, writing, and medical humanities. She has published essays on mental illness in film, antipsychiatry in Lauren Slater’s memoirs, physiognomy and madness in Jane Eyre, teaching Melville online, and the poetry of Amy Lowell, among other subjects. She is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disabilities Studies and is co-editor (with Catherine J. Prendergast) of a recent special issue, “Emotion and Disability.” Her current research project focuses on schizophrenia and psychotomimesis: the imitation and representation of psychosis in medicine and literature.
Working Group Affiliation
Faye Ginsburg
Fellow, Anthropology, New York University
Faye Ginsburg is David B. Kriser Professor of Anthropology at NYU where is is also Director of the Center for Media, Culture and History, Co-Director of the NYU Council for the Study of Disability, and Co-Director of the Center for Religion and Media. Prizewinning author/editor of four Her research focuses on movements for social transformation, from her early work on abortion activists, to her longstanding research on indigenous media, to her current work, with Rayna Rapp, on cultural innovation and learning disabilities.
Faye Ginsburg
David B. Kriser Professor of Anthropology, NYU
Faye Ginsburg is David B. Kriser Professor of Anthropology at NYU where is is also Director of the Center for Media, Culture and History, Co-Director of the NYU Council for the Study of Disability, and Co-Director of the Center for Religion and Media. Prizewinning author/editor of four Her research focuses on movements for social transformation, from her early work on abortion activists, to her longstanding research on indigenous media, to her current work, with Rayna Rapp, on cultural innovation and learning disabilities. She collaborated for several years with Lawrence Carter Long on the Dis This screening series at NYU, and is on the advisory board of the Reelabilities Film Festival. She is parent to a daughter with the rare degenerative genetic condition, Familial Dysautonomia and is Vice President of the Familial Dysautonomia Foundation.
Working Group Affiliation
Amy E. Hughes
Assistant Professor of Theater, City University of New York
Amy E. Hughes is Assistant Professor and Deputy Chair for Graduate Studies in the Department of Theater, Brooklyn College (CUNY). Her work focuses on the relationship between theater/performance and visual, print, and material culture in nineteenth-century America.
Amy E. Hughes
Assistant Professor of Theater, City University of New York
Amy E. Hughes is Assistant Professor and Deputy Chair for Graduate Studies in the Department of Theater, Brooklyn College (CUNY). Her work focuses on the relationship between theater/performance and visual, print, and material culture in nineteenth-century America. In her first book, Spectacles of Reform: Theater and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Michigan Press, 2012), she examines the interpersonal and representational dynamics of the freak show in order to develop a theory of spectacular performance, arguing that the body—as culture’s most conspicuous target for normalization—plays a crucial role in generating our sense of the spectacular. Her essays and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Journal of American Culture, New England Theatre Journal, Performing Arts Resources, and Theatre Journal (among others) as well as two edited collections. In 2010, she was honored with Brooklyn College’s Excellence in Teaching Award.
Working Group Affiliation
Stephanie Jensen-Moulton
Fellow, Musicology, Brooklyn College
Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, Assistant Professor of Musicology at Brooklyn College, has published articles on women in hip-hop, the 19th-century piano prodigy "Blind Tom" Wiggins, feminist pedagogy and other topics in American music. She has presented papers and lecture-recitals at numerous national and international conferences, including IASPM Rome and national meetings of the Society for American Music and the American Musicological Society. She received the Ph.D.
Stephanie Jensen-Moulton
Assistant Professor of Musicology, Brooklyn College
Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, Assistant Professor of Musicology at Brooklyn College, has published articles on women in hip-hop, the 19th-century piano prodigy "Blind Tom" Wiggins, feminist pedagogy and other topics in American music. She has presented papers and lecture-recitals at numerous national and international conferences, including IASPM Rome and national meetings of the Society for American Music and the American Musicological Society. She received the Ph.D. in Musicology and Certificate in Women's studies from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2008, winning the Carolyn Heilbrun Prize for her dissertation on Miriam Gideon's 1958 opera Fortunato, which will be published by A-R Editions as part of the Recent Researches in American Music Series in 2012. Jensen-Moulton's current research focuses on intersections of American opera and disability. She has been awarded a Whiting Fellowship for excellence in humanities teaching for Fall 2011.
Working Group Affiliation
Stephanie Kerschbaum
Fellow, English, University of Delaware
Stephanie Kerschbaum (B.A. The Ohio State University, M.A., Ph.D. University of Wisconsin-Madison) conducts research focused on diversity issues and the teaching of writing. She is an associate professor of English at the University of Delaware where she teaches writing, rhetoric, and composition theory in the University of Delaware Writing program and special topics courses. She is a Faculty Scholar affiliated with UD’s Center for the Study of Diversity. She also teaches undergraduate courses on diversity and higher education and teaches graduate seminars in composition theory and pedagogy.
Stephanie Kerschbaum
English, University of Delaware
Stephanie Kerschbaum (B.A. The Ohio State University, M.A., Ph.D. University of Wisconsin-Madison) conducts research focused on diversity issues and the teaching of writing. She is an associate professor of English at the University of Delaware where she teaches writing, rhetoric, and composition theory in the University of Delaware Writing program and special topics courses. She is a Faculty Scholar affiliated with UD’s Center for the Study of Diversity. She also teaches undergraduate courses on diversity and higher education and teaches graduate seminars in composition theory and pedagogy.
Professor Kerschbaum is a 2014-2015 Postdoctoral Research Leave Fellow for the American Association of University Women. Before coming to Delaware in 2008, she was an assistant professor of English at Texas A&M University.
Her book, Toward a New Rhetoric of Difference, was published in 2014 as part of the Studies in Writing and Rhetoric series published by NCTE and was awarded the 2015 Advancement of Knowledge Award from the Conference on College Composition and Communication. The book makes an argument for a new way of understanding how difference circulates and takes shape within writing classrooms, one that is dynamic, relational, and emergent through developing interpersonal relationships, and has been reviewed in Disability Studies Quarterly and Reflections: A Journal of Public Rhetoric, Civic Writing, and Service Learning.
She is currently working on a project focused on narrative and disability disclosure. she received several grants to support her disability scholarship and activism, most recently a 2014-15 Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from the AAUW’s American Fellowships Program. She has also received a collaborative Research Initiative Grant from the Conference on College Composition and Communication, and individual grants from UD’s Interdisciplinary Humanities Research Center and UD’s Center for the Study of Diversity.
Working Group Affiliation
Ynestra King
Fellow, Feminist Studies, Barnard Center for Research on Women
Ynestra King is a feminist teacher, writer and oral historian. She is an ecofeminist theorist, and a founder of Women and Life on Earth and the feminist anti-militarist movement, as well as the Committee on Women, Population and Environment. Her current work is on disability narratives and body politics, focusing particularly on women and disability. She is also at work on a memoir tentatively entitled Falling. She was previously visiting Scholar at the Barnard Center for Research on Women.
Ynestra King
Feminist Theorist
Ynestra King is a feminist teacher, writer and oral historian. She is an ecofeminist theorist, and a founder of Women and Life on Earth and the feminist anti-militarist movement, as well as the Committee on Women, Population and Environment. Her current work is on disability narratives and body politics, focusing particularly on women and disability. She is also at work on a memoir tentatively entitled Falling. She was previously visiting Scholar at the Barnard Center for Research on Women.
Working Group Affiliation
Laura Mauldin
Fellow, Sociology, University of Connecticut
Laura Mauldin's research draws from the fields of medical sociology, science and technology studies (STS), and disability studies. She uses ethnographic methods to show how individual experiences are situated within institutional structures and a larger sociocultural context. All of her research is concerned with how science, technology, and medicine shape contemporary life and is based on the contention that disability – like race, class, or gender - is a political and social category. Her aim is to give voice to the experiences of individuals and families who utilize healthcare services and/or medical technologies in order to show the ambivalent qualities of technoscientific change, the politics of disability and illness, and to suggest what healthcare policies or issues need to be further researched or improved.
Laura Mauldin
Sociology, University of Connecticut
Laura Mauldin's research draws from the fields of medical sociology, science and technology studies (STS), and disability studies. She uses ethnographic methods to show how individual experiences are situated within institutional structures and a larger sociocultural context. All of her research is concerned with how science, technology, and medicine shape contemporary life and is based on the contention that disability – like race, class, or gender - is a political and social category. Her aim is to give voice to the experiences of individuals and families who utilize healthcare services and/or medical technologies in order to show the ambivalent qualities of technoscientific change, the politics of disability and illness, and to suggest what healthcare policies or issues need to be further researched or improved.
Professor Mauldin attended the University of Texas at Austin (UT), where she majored in linguistics and focused on ASL for her thesis. She has also worked at the Texas School for the Blind in the deaf/blind department where she was trained in Orientation and Mobility and how to work with deaf/blind individuals. After graduating, she briefly entered the Interpreter Training Program at Austin Community College. But during the first semester there, she was accepted as a graduate student in ASL and Deaf Studies at Gallaudet University, which is the only liberal arts university for the deaf in the world and everything is conducted in ASL. As a Master's student, she also spent time in Bristol, UK as a visiting scholar in Deaf studies at the University of Bristol (sadly, the Deaf Studies Centre is now closed, but you can read about it here) and a summer completing the certificate in Sexuality, Culture and Society at the University of Amsterdam.
Mauldin entered the PhD program in Sociology at the Graduate Center - City University of New York (CUNY), where Barbara Katz Rothman chaired her dissertation committee. After finishing, she was invited to be a visiting professor for one year in the Science, Technology and Society department at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). She also taught an introduction to sociology course at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, which is housed within RIT. The following year, she returned to New York City and began her tenure track position at the University of Connecticut where she is jointly appointed in Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies and Human Development/Family Studies, with an affiliation in the Department of Sociology.
Mauldin is currently developing new research projects related to spousal/partner caregiving, disability, and medical technologies. She still has interests in deaf-related topics. She is on the Board of Corporators for the American School for the Deaf and maintains her interpreting certification with the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf. She is co-chair of the Disabilities Division of the Society for the Study of Social Problems and active in the Disability and Society Section of the American Sociological Association. She is also affiliated with (or just a fan of!) a variety of other groups, initiatives and professional associations, such as the NYU Council for the Study of Disability, the Future of Disability Studies project at Columbia, the Well Spouse Association, the Center for LGBTQ Studies at CUNY, the Society for Social Studies of Science, Society for Disability Studies, American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, National Women's Studies Association, and Sociologists for Women in Society.
Working Group Affiliation
Ariel Merkel
Sociology, The New School for Social Research
Ariel Merkel is a Sociology PhD candidate at the New School for Social Research, with a focus on disability studies. She earned her MA at NSSR in May 2011, and holds a BA (cum laude) in Cultural Anthropology from Wells College, a small women’s college in the Finger Lakes region of New York State. Upon graduation in 2005, she was awarded the Carter A. Woods Prize for her thesis, which analyzed the strategies of Kanaka Maoli (indigenous Hawaiian) activists involved in the Cultural Revitalization Movement.
Ariel Merkel
Sociology, The New School for Social Research
Ariel Merkel is a Sociology PhD candidate at the New School for Social Research, with a focus on disability studies. She earned her MA at NSSR in May 2011, and holds a BA (cum laude) in Cultural Anthropology from Wells College, a small women’s college in the Finger Lakes region of New York State. Upon graduation in 2005, she was awarded the Carter A. Woods Prize for her thesis, which analyzed the strategies of Kanaka Maoli (indigenous Hawaiian) activists involved in the Cultural Revitalization Movement. Ariel supplemented this research with a six-week ethnographic study in O’hau and the Big Island where she conducted interviews with “houseless” Kanaka Maoli, who reside in beach-tents as a result of the land-struggle throughout the islands. Prior to returning to graduate school, Ariel worked for People Inc., a non-profit agency that serves the developmentally disabled, where she spent four years administrating and managing residential facilities (IRA and SIRA) and served as a Medicaid Service Coordinator (MSC) for the northern region of Buffalo, NY. She was also involved in Deaf Adult Services during her time in Buffalo, and enrolled in several American Sign Language courses and is able to have basic conversations in ASL. Her current research stems from her previous nonprofit work with people with disabilities, specifically feminist disability theory. She is fascinated by how disability, a malleable identity which shifts spatially and temporarily and yet is so deeply rooted to the body and literally embedded in bone, intersects with other identities that are typically conceptualized as socially constructed performances.
Working Group Affiliation
Mara Mills
Fellow, Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University
Mara Mills is Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. She received her Ph.D.
Mara Mills
Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University
Mara Mills is Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. She received her Ph.D. in History of Science from Harvard. She is completing a book (On the Phone: Deafness and Communication Engineering) on the significance of phonetics and deaf education to the emergence of “communication engineering” in early twentieth-century telephony; this concept and set of practices later gave rise to information theory, digital coding, and cybernetics. Articles from this project can be found in Social Text, differences, and The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies. Her second book project, Print Disability and New Reading Formats, examines the reformatting of print over the course of the past century by blind and other print disabled readers, with a focus on Talking Books and electronic reading machines. Mills is the co-editor of a recent issue of Grey Room on the “audiovisual” and the recipient of the 2010 Irving K. Zola Award for Emerging Scholars in Disability Studies.
Ittai Orr
PhD Student, American Studies, Yale University
Ittai is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies. His dissertation is an intellectual history of intelligence and intellectual ability in 18th- and 19th-century America with a focus on popular literary texts. His other areas of expertise include the history of race, sexuality and gender studies, disability studies, and the history of capitalism. He has been a tutor for the undergraduate non-fiction writing course “Daily Themes,” a writing instructor, and an LSAT-prep tutor and instructor. His work has been published in American Quarterly and Public Books, and he has presented at the Modern and Contemporary Studies Initiative, American Studies Association and the Modern Language Association.
Ittai Orr
PhD Student, American Studies, Yale University
Ittai is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies. His dissertation is an intellectual history of intelligence and intellectual ability in 18th- and 19th-century America with a focus on popular literary texts. His other areas of expertise include the history of race, sexuality and gender studies, disability studies, and the history of capitalism. He has been a tutor for the undergraduate non-fiction writing course “Daily Themes,” a writing instructor, and an LSAT-prep tutor and instructor. His work has been published in American Quarterly and Public Books, and he has presented at the Modern and Contemporary Studies Initiative, American Studies Association and the Modern Language Association.
Working Group Affiliation
Julia Miele Rodas
Fellow, English, City University of New York
Julia Miele Rodas is assistant professor of English at the City University of New York (CUNY). She teaches writing at CUNY’s Bronx Community College and is on the faculty of the Master’s program in Disability Studies at the CUNY School of Professional Studies. Her writing has appeared in Victorian Literature & Culture, Dickens Studies Annual, the Victorian Review, the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, Disability Studies Quarterly, the Explicator, and other venues.
Julia Miele Rodas
Assistant Professor of English, City University of New York
Julia Miele Rodas is assistant professor of English at the City University of New York (CUNY). She teaches writing at CUNY’s Bronx Community College and is on the faculty of the Master’s program in Disability Studies at the CUNY School of Professional Studies. Her writing has appeared in Victorian Literature & Culture, Dickens Studies Annual, the Victorian Review, the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, Disability Studies Quarterly, the Explicator, and other venues. She has also served as a contributing editor of the Encyclopedia of American Disability History (Facts on File, 2009) and is on the editorial board of the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies. She is currently working on a book—Autistic Disturbances—that theorizes the role of autistic rhetoric and aesthetic in literature.
Harilyn Rousso
Fellow, Economics, Brandeis University
Harilyn Rousso is a writer, painter, educator, social worker, psychotherapist and activist who has worked in the disability rights field, with a particular emphasis on issues of women and girls with disabilities, for more than twenty-five years. She is the founder of the Networking Project for Disabled Women and Girls of the YWCA/NYC, a unique mentoring program that has been replicated widely, and the President of Disabilities Unlimited Consulting Services, which provides education and training on disability equity issues.
Harilyn Rousso
Writer and Activist
Harilyn Rousso is a writer, painter, educator, social worker, psychotherapist and activist who has worked in the disability rights field, with a particular emphasis on issues of women and girls with disabilities, for more than twenty-five years. She is the founder of the Networking Project for Disabled Women and Girls of the YWCA/NYC, a unique mentoring program that has been replicated widely, and the President of Disabilities Unlimited Consulting Services, which provides education and training on disability equity issues.
In addition to her memoir, Don’t Call Me Inspirational: A Disabled Feminist Talks Back,Rousso is the author of numerous publications on gender and disability, including Disabled, Female and Proud! and Strong Proud Sisters: Girls and Young Women with Disabilities (available online at http://www.centerwomenpolicy.org/pdfs/dis3.pdf and is the co-editor of Double Jeopardy, and Addressing Gender Equity in Special Education. She is also the executive producer of the award-winning documentary Positive Images: Portraits of Women with Disabilities, which was shown on PBS.
Rousso is a former board member of the National Women’s Hall of Fame, the Center for Women Policy Studies, the Ms. Foundation for Women, the Sister Fund and Educational Equity Concepts, and a former commissioner with the New York City Commission on Human Rights. In 2003, she was selected by the National Women’s History Project as an honoree for National Women’s History Month. http://www.nwhp.org/resourcecenter/biographycenter.php
Rousso’s educational background includes a B.A. in economics from Brandeis University, graduate work in economics at Harvard University, a Masters in Education from Boston University, a Masters in Social Work from New York University, and a Certificate in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy from the New York School for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy.
Working Group Affiliation