Sari Altschuler is a doctoral candidate in English at the CUNY's Graduate Center and the 2011-2012 Barra Dissertation Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. Her research interests include early American literature and culture, 19th century literature and culture, literature and medicine, and disability studies. Her dissertation is tentatively titled "National Physiology: Medicine, Literature, and the Invention of the American Body, 1789 -- 1860." Her work on historicizing disability has recently appeared in Disability Studies Quarterly.

Jenny James is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia. Her academic interests include twentieth-century North American literature, feminist and queer theory, memory studies, and American culture. Her dissertation is tentatively entitled: “Intimating Affiliative Futures: Questioning Genealogy and Identity in the Post-1960 American Novel,” and will explore the concomitant representation of reproductive genealogies and political identity at work in novels from the 1960s until today. In attempting to explore the figuration of intimacy as a way to find commonality between authors such as Tim O’Brien, Margaret Atwood, Philip Roth and James Baldwin, this project negotiates competing collective memories of the 1960s.

Robin J. Kemper is currently studying for her M.S. in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University.  Hoping professionally to write and teach on disability-related matters, Robin has twice taught a Narrative Medicine seminar to Columbia University postbaccalaureate premedical students and undergraduate premedical students.  She is also a Curriculum Committee Representative in the Narrative Medicine program.  Robin earned her J.D. at Yale Law School and her B.A. in English at Yale University.

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.  

John Michalczyk is a doctoral student in Sociology at the New School for Social Research, currently working on a project exploring disability in virtual worlds. His other interests include social interaction, ethnography, and identity formation. John combines his academic research in Sociology on disabilities, hidden and visible, with his interest in documentary filmmaking. His work includes a short documentary on Keith Jones, a musician and disabilities advocate (Keith Jones: Un-Rapping Disability) and a nearly completed documentary on the artist, Edwina Sandys (Recreating Life in Art). His current film project focuses on music and disabilities.

Sean Murray is a doctoral student in musicology at the CUNY Graduate Center. He has presented numerous conference papers on race and gender in American music, and published on the relationship between the nineteenth century piano industry and the African ivory and slave trades. His dissertation examines the intersection of race and disability in American music. Sean was the recipient of a graduate student fellowship at the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution.

Akemi Nishida is a doctoral student in the social personality psychology PhD program and an adjunct lecturer in Psychology and Disability Studies at City University of New York. Using frameworks of social justice studies and critical disability studies, her work focuses on the politicization of disabled people and community building in relation to intersecting oppression and privilege. She is also a performer in a project ‘GIMP’ by Heidi Latsky Dance and a starting member of DISLABELEDtv, a media organization by disabled youth/young adults. Through her activism-oriented scholarship and art, she works toward disability justice and larger social justice.

Alanna Valdez is a Master’s student in philosophy at the City University of New York, Graduate Center. She also holds a Master’s degree in Ethics, Peace, and Global Affairs from American University’s School of International Service, where she wrote her thesis on how the recently ratified UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities shifts disability rights to a human rights perspective. Her philosophical interests include: personhood, agency, and non-rational justifications for human rights. She is particularly interested in the intersections between the opposing models of disability and exploring possible ways for their compatibility. 

Emmanuel von Schack is a deaf art history graduate student at Hunter College; his master's thesis focuses on German artists who were veterans of the First World War and the works of art they created during and after the War. By interweaving disability theories with Foucauldian feminist and queer theories, he explores the complex relationship between masculinity and disability as conveyed in Weimar culture and art. He works as an educator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and he is the director of ArtASL, a project he founded to develop art lexicon in American Sign Language. He also collaborates with European and American professionals on other projects intended to increase museum access for deaf people.