Michael Rembis
Fellow, History, University at Buffalo
Michael A. Rembis is the Director of the Center for Disability Studies and an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University at Buffalo (SUNY). He came to Buffalo from the University of Notre Dame, where he was a visiting scholar in the Department of American Studies and the Department of History. His work, which has appeared in many journals and edited collections, has won several awards, including the 2008 Irving K. Zola Award, awarded annually by the Society for Disability Studies to emerging scholars.
Michael Rembis
Director of the Center for Disability Studies and Professor of History, University at Buffalo
Michael A. Rembis is the Director of the Center for Disability Studies and an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University at Buffalo (SUNY). He came to Buffalo from the University of Notre Dame, where he was a visiting scholar in the Department of American Studies and the Department of History. His work, which has appeared in many journals and edited collections, has won several awards, including the 2008 Irving K. Zola Award, awarded annually by the Society for Disability Studies to emerging scholars. His first book, Defining Deviance: Sex, Science, and Delinquent Girls, 1890-1960, is available from University of Illinois Press. He is currently working on a disability history anthology co-edited with Susan Burch, forthcoming from University of Illinois Press and an Oxford University Press Handbook on Disability History, which he is co-editing with Kim Nielsen and Cathy Kudlick. In 2012, Rembis and co-editor Kim Nielsen launched the Disability Histories book series also with University of Illinois Press.
Since completing the PhD in history, Rembis has served as co-founder and member of the Disability Studies Initiative at the University of Arizona, where he helped to create an undergraduate curriculum in Disability Studies. He also spent two-years working with faculty and administrators at the University of Notre Dame, building their Disability Studies Forum. Most recently, Rembis has been fortunate to benefit from a close collaboration with David Gerber (Distinguished Professor of History) at the University at Buffalo, where they have worked to establish the Center for Disability Studies and create a formal master’s level (MA) degree concentration in Disability Studies. He serves on the American Historical Association’s Task Force on Disability and the Board of Directors of the Society for Disability Studies.
J.T. Roane
Fellow, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, University of Cincinnati.
J.T. Roane is assistant professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati. He is also part of the University’s urban futures initiative. Roane is broadly concerned about matters of geography, sexuality, and religion in relation to Black communities. He is at work on a manuscript, Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place in Philadelphia, which historicizes multiple modes of insurgent spatial assemblage Black communities articulated in Philadelphia in the second half of the twentieth.
J.T Roane
Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, University of Cincinnati
J.T. Roane is assistant professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati. He is also part of the University’s urban futures initiative. Roane is broadly concerned about matters of geography, sexuality, and religion in relation to Black communities. He is at work on a manuscript, Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place in Philadelphia, which historicizes multiple modes of insurgent spatial assemblage Black communities articulated in Philadelphia in the second half of the twentieth.
Working Group Affiliation
Huáscar Robles
Fellow, Photographer, Columbia University
Huáscar Robles is an author and photographer from Caguas, Puerto Rico. He has written about the revitalization of Santurce, Puerto Rico through tax incentives and the impact of the economic crisis on the Island’s middle class.
Huáscar Robles
Author and Photographer
Huáscar Robles is an author and photographer from Caguas, Puerto Rico. He has written about the revitalization of Santurce, Puerto Rico through tax incentives and the impact of the economic crisis on the Island’s middle class. His current research details the the impact of the municipal bond debt of Puerto Rico’s culture.
Huáscar's photo and miltimedia exhibits in the US and Puerto Rico include The Country Under My Skin, Los silencios de Santurce, and Portraits of Marassa. He also directed The Invisible Coast, a documentary about Haitian merchants’ struggle in Loíza, Puerto Rico. His collection Country Under My Skin was acquired by the Rhode Island Historical Society’s Permanent Gallery in 2010.
Huáscar is author of Puertos príncipes: temblemos todos, a journal and photo book on Haiti after the earthquake. He has published in The New York Times, Chicago Tribune’s Hoy, and The San Juan Star among others.
Working Group Affiliation
Unpayable Debt: Capital, Violence, and the New Global Economy
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.
Akira Drake Rodriguez
Fellow, Social Policy and Practice, University of Pennsylvania
Akira Drake Rodriguez is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School in the Department of City & Regional Planning. Her research examines the politics of urban planning, or the ways that disenfranchised groups re-appropriate their marginalized spaces in the city to gain access to and sustain urban political power.
Akira Drake Rodriguez
Assistant Professor, Stuart Weitzman School of Design and School of Social Policy and Practice, University of Pennsylvania
Akira Drake Rodriguez is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School in the Department of City & Regional Planning. Her research examines the politics of urban planning, or the ways that disenfranchised groups re-appropriate their marginalized spaces in the city to gain access to and sustain urban political power. Dr. Rodriguez’s forthcoming manuscript, Diverging Space for Deviants: The Politics of Atlanta’s Public Housing (University of Georgia Press 2021), explores how the politics of public housing planning and race in Atlanta created a politics of resistance within its public housing developments. This research offers the alternative benefits of public housing, outside of shelter provision, to challenge the overwhelming narrative of public housing as a dysfunctional relic of the welfare state. Dr. Rodriguez was recently awarded a Spencer Foundation grant to study how parent and educational advocates mobilize around school facility planning processes in Philadelphia.
Working Group Affiliation
Insurgent Domesticities, Co-Director
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