Dr. Adrienne Asch is the Edward and Robin Milstein Professor of Bioethics and Director of the Center for Ethics at Yeshiva University, as well as Professor of Epidemiology and Population Health and Family and Social Medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Dr. Asch provides overall leadership to the Center for Ethics. In addition, she teaches courses throughout the university on bioethics and professional ethics. She publishes widely in books and peer-reviewed journals and presents at conferences throughout the world on issues related to her teaching and research. Her scholarly work has focused on ethical issues in reproduction, death and dying, and justice for disadvantaged minorities in American society. She is editor with Erik Parens of Prenatal Testing and Disability Rights, published in 2000 by Georgetown University Press and a co-editor of The Double-Edged Helix: Social Implications of Genetics in a Diverse Society, published in 2002 by the Johns Hopkins University Press. Dr. Asch is a past board member of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, past president and board member of the Society of Disability Studies, a fellow of the Hastings center, and a member of the NY State Task Force on Life and the Law.

Jonathan Beller is Professor of English and Humanities and Critical and Visual Studies, Pratt Institute.  He is the author of The Cinematic Mode of Production: Towards A Political Economy of the Society of the Spectacle, (Lebanon: Dartmouth College/University Press of New England, 2006) and Acquiring Eyes: Philippine Visuality, Nationalist Struggle and The World Media-System, (Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2006). He has  written numerous articles including “21st Century Fascism, ‘Political’ Killing, and the Crisis of Representation,” Kontra-Gahum: Academics Against Political Killings, ed., Sarah Raymundo, Manila: Ibon Publications, 2006, “Kino-I, Kino World: Notes on the Cinematic Mode of Production,” in The Visual Culture Reader, Second Edition, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff, Routledge, 2002 and “Third Cinema in a Global Frame: Curacha, Yahoo!, and  Ishmael Bernal’s Manila By Night,” Positions  9:2 Fall 2001, 331-368. He has also written the entries for “Third Cinema and Visual Culture” in The New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, New York: Scribner’s Sons, 2005 and a variety of occasional pieces including film reviews for radio, newspaper and the web. His current book project is entitled, The Tortured Signifier: Signs of the State of Exception.  For his work on Philippine Visual Culture he has been the recipient of a Fulbright Senior Scholar Award and a Getty Grant. Recent grants and honors include Mellon Research Stipends and Travel Awards in 2005, 2006 and 2007 and the selection of his essay “Paying Attention,” published in Cabinet #24 (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2007), for Documenta XII.  He has taught at Barnard College, Pratt Institute, University of California, Santa Cruz, San Francisco State University, and the University of the Philippines.

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.

Tina Campt is Associate Professor of Women's Studies and History at Duke University. An interdisciplinary scholar by necessity, her work theorizes gender, memory and racial formation among African Diasporic communities in Europe and Germany in particular. In addition to article publications in New German Critique, Radical History Review, Meridians and Callaloo, she is the author of Other Germans:Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich (2004), which examines the mutual constitution of racial and gendered formations among German Blacks in the Third Reich. She is co-editor with Michelle M. Wright of a special issue of Callaloo (2003) on the Black German experience, and together with Paul Gilroy, she co-edited the volume Der Black Atlantik (2004), a collection of essays emerging out of their work as guest curators of the multimedia cultural project “The Black Atlantic:Traveling Cultures, Counter-History and Networked Identities” at the House of World Cultures in Berlin. Her new project, Imaging Black Europe: Archive,Photography and the African Diaspora, is a study of how two different Black European communities - Black Britons and Black Germans - used photography as an expressive cultural practice to create forms of identification and community in the first half of the twentieth century in Germany and the UK. Together with Deborah Thomas, she is co-convener of the scholarly and curricular project “Diasporic Hegemonies: Gendering the Diaspora and Racing the Transnational.” In addition to her published writing, Campt holds advisory positions as a Corresponding Editor for Feminist Review, on the Board of Editors of the Journal of Women's History, and the Editorial Advisory Board of Duke University Press.

Hazel Carby is the Charles C. and Dorothea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies, Professor of American Studies, and Director of the Initiative on Race Gender and Globalization at Yale University.  Her books include Reconstructing Womanhood (OUP, 1987), Race Men (Harvard, 1998), and Cultures in Babylon (Verso, 1999). Recent publications include: “A Strange and Bitter Crop: The Spectacle of Torture,” Open Democracy; the Foreword to making race matter: bodies, space & identity, eds. Claire Alexander and Caroline Knowles; and two essays, “The New Auction Block: Blackness and the Marketplace,” in Companion to African American Literature, ed. Lewis Gordon and “Postcolonial Translations” for Ethnic and Racial Studies. Her current work in progress is Child of Empire: Racializing Subjects in Post WWII Britain. 

Leonard Cassuto, a professor of English at Fordham University, has been teaching and writing about disability since Rosemarie Garland-Thomson lighted his path into the field more than fifteen years ago.  His most recent piece is “Disability Studies 2.0,” which appeared in American Literary History in 2010.

Anne Anlin Cheng is Professor of English and the Associate Chair in the Department of English and a core faculty in the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University. She specializes in race studies and psychoanalytic theory and works in twentieth-century American literature, with special focus on Asian American and African American literatures. She is the author of The Melancholy of Race: Assimilation, Psychoanalysis, and Hidden Grief (Oxford University Press), which explores the notion of racial grief at the intersection of culture, history, and law. She is currently completing a manuscript on Josephine Baker and the intimate relationship between the theatricalization of racialized skin in the early twentieth century and the Modernist ideal of the denuded surface.

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.

David J. Connor is an Associate Professor in the School of Education of Hunter College, CUNY. He is the author of three books and numerous articles on disability and education. David's areas of interest include teacher education, learning disabilities, inclusive education, and social justice issues. For the last decade he has contributed to the development of the growing field of Disability Studies in Education. For more information and publications see www.drdavidconnor.com.

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. 

Lennard J. Davis is Professor in the English Department in the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he had also served as Head.  In addition, he is Professor of Disability and Human Development in the School of Applied Health Sciences of the University of Illinois at Chicago, as well as Professor of Medical Education in the College of Medicine.  He is also director of Project Biocultures a think-tank devoted to issues around the intersection of culture, medicine, disability, biotechnology, and the biosphere.  Davis is the author of two works on the novel–Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (Columbia U. Press, 1983, rpt. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996) and Resisting Novels: Fiction and Ideology (Routledge, 1987, rpt. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001) and co-editor of Left Politics and the Literary Profession.  His works on disability include Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (Verso, 1995), which won the 1996 Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights’ annual award for the best scholarship on the subject of intolerance in North America, and The Disability Studies Reader (Routledge, 1996).  His memoir My Sense of Silence (University of Illinois Press, 2000), was chosen Editor’s Choice Book for the Chicago Tribune, selected for the National Book Award for 2000, and nominated for the Book Critics Circle Award for 2000. He has appeared on National Public Radio’s Fresh Air to discuss the memoir, which describes his childhood in a Deaf family.  Davis has also edited his parents’ correspondence Shall I Say a Kiss: The Courtship Letters of a Deaf Couple, 1936-38 (Gallaudet University Press, 1999).   Davis is a co-founder of the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession, and he is on the board of several academic journals.   Having written widely for newspapers and magazines, Davis is also the author of a novel entitled The Sonnets (State University of New York Press, March 2001).  A collection of his essays entitled Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions was published by New York University Press in August 2002.  He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002-2003 for Obsession: A History (University of Chicago Press, 2008). His book Go Ask Your Father: One Man's Obsession to Find Himself, His Origins, and the Meaning of Life Through Genetic Testing will be published in 2009 by Random House. He has written numerous articles in The Nation, The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Chronicle of Higher Education and other print media.  Davis has also been a commentator on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, and appeared on Morning Edition, This American Life, Odyssey, The Leonard Lopate Show and other NPR affiliates.  His current interests include disability-related issues; literary and cultural theory; genetics, race, identity; and biocultural issues.

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.

Seth Fein's work focuses on the crossborder Americas and audiovisual culture.  He was a professor of history at Yale (2002-2010) where he taught graduate and undergraduate course on the international and transnational histories of the Americas.  He currently teaches in Columbia's departments of Latin American & Caribbean Studies and History. His book, Transnational Projections: The United States in the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema, will be published by Duke. He is now completing the research and writing of a collection of essays, The Idea of the Western Hemisphere, which includes studies of the Pan American Highway and of U.S. foreign policy's use of Latin American television in the 1960s, which is also the subject of a documentary -- Our Neighborhood -- that he is now directing.  Fein has commented on Washington's post-9/11 use of TV in the Middle East and consulted on historical documentaries about moving images; he appears in the BBC’s The Thirties in Colour (2008).  He is also currently co-making (with Sophie Ziner) a documentary about the boundary-defying socioculture of radio-control car, plane, and helicopter enthusiasts who drive and fly in Flushing, Queens. Fein did his Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin.  Among the grants that have supported his work are awards from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities. His publications include: "Producing the Cold War in Mexico: The Public Limits of Covert Communications" in In From the Cold: Political and Cultural Dimensions of the Latin American Cold War (2008); "Proyectando la relación especial: México-Estados Unidos durante la Guerra Fría" in ¿Somos especiales? Las relaciones de México y Gran Bretaña con Estados Unidos (2006); "New Empire into Old: Making Mexican Newsreels the Cold War Way," Diplomatic History 28.5 (2004); “Culture across Borders in the Americas,” History Compass 1.1 (2003); chapters in Culture and International History (2003), Fragments of a Golden Age (2001), Visible Nations (2000), Mexico's Cinema (1999), Close Encounters of Empire (1998), Horizontes del segundo siglo (1998), México-Estados Unidos, encuentros y desencuentros en el cine (1996); and articles in Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 17, Objeto Visual 7, Nuevo Texto Crítico 10.21, Film-Historia 4.2, Secuencia 34, Historia y grafía 4.  His film reviews have appeared in the American Historical Review.

Rebecca Garden, PhD, is Associate Professor in the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, NY.  She received her doctorate from Columbia University’s Department of English and Comparative Literature. She has published on empathy, the humanities, and medicine in New Literary History and the Journal for General Internal Medicine and on narrative, Deafness, and disability in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, the Journal of Medical Humanities, Medical Humanities, and the Journal of Clinical Ethics. Garden teaches the health humanities, disability studies, and bioethics to nurses, public health students, medical students, residents, and hospital social workers, as well as liberal arts undergraduates. She also co-leads a graduate course in social research that investigates Deaf communication in the health care setting, which is part of the Campaign for Deaf Access: Expanding Communication in Health Care research project: http://disabilitystudies.syr.edu/what/deafaccess.aspx. She is Executive Director of the Consortium for Culture and Medicine, an inter-institutional and inter-disciplinary research and education collaborative, and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Medical Humanities and Ars Medica: A Journal of Medicine, the Arts, and Humanities.

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.

Atina Grossmann teaches Modern German and European History, and Gender Studies. A graduate of the City College of New York (BA) and Rutgers University (Ph.D), she has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, German Marshall Fund, American Council of Learned Societies, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and the American Academy in Berlin. Her publications include Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920-1950 (1995,97), Crimes of War: Guilt and Denial in the Twentieth Century (co-editor with Bartov and Nolan, 2001), and When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (co-editor with Renate Bridenthal and Marion Kaplan, 1984). Her most recent book is Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany, 1945-1949 (Princeton University Press, 2007)

Maggie Hoffman is co-founder and the director of Project DOCC - Delivery of Chronic Care.  In this unique medical education program, parents of children with special health care needs (CSHCN) and family caregivers of adults with chronic conditions teach doctors and other health professionals about living with illness and disability in their communities. Project DOCC’s pediatric program is in 28 academic medical centers across the United States and in Australia. Maggie is a founder and member of the New York Self-Determination Coalition (nyselfd).  NYSELFD promotes self-determined lives for individuals with developmental disabilities.  Maggie co-founded the Long Island Network for Families of Children with Special Health Care Needs, a coalition of medical and education professionals, parents, and representatives from government agencies addressing gaps in services for families on Long Island. She founded New Survivors, a peer support group for parents of children with special needs. Maggie coordinated special projects for the Developmental Disabilities Institute, Huntington, New York, such as resource fairs and parent-to-parent connections. In Minnesota at the ARC of Olmsted County, Maggie led parent support groups and facilitated transitions home from neonatal intensive care units (NICUs).  She spent 6 years as the family-centered care specialist (for Pediatrics and Geriatrics) at the North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System.

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.

Martha S. Jones is Associate Professor of History and Afroamerican Studies, and Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Jones holds a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University (2001) and a J.D. from the CUNY School of Law (1987). She currently serves as a 2008 Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the National Constitution Center. Jones has been a fellow with the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History, a recipient of the AHA’s Littleton-Griswold research grant (2002), and a visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, in Paris (2006 and 2007). She directs the Law and Slavery and Freedom Project, an international research collaborative with Rebecca J. Scott (Michigan) and Jean Hébrard (EHESS) and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Women's History. Jones is the author of All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830-1900(2007), which examines nineteenth-century debates over the rights of women. Her current work includes two book projects: Overturning Dred Scott: Everyday Life at the Intersection of Race and Law in an Antebellum City and Riding the Atlantic World Circuit: One Household's Journey Through the Law of Slavery and Freedom, a comparative study of slavery and law in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century French Caribbean and United States.

Eva Feder Kittay is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University/SUNY. Among her most recent major publications are “On the Margins of Moral Personhood” (Ethics, October 2005) and Blackwell Studies in Feminist Philosophy (with Linda Alcoff, 2006) and Cognitive Disability and Its Challenge to Moral Philosophy (with Licia Carlson, Blackwell 2010).  Among her other books in Feminist Philosophy are Theoretical Perspectives on Dependency and Women (with Ellen Feder), 2002; Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency 1999. Women and Moral Theory 1987. She is at work on a book, tentatively entitled, A Quest for A Humbler Philosophy: Thinking about Disabled Minds and Things that Matter, which explores challenges posed by cognitive disabilities to philosophy and ethics.  She is also working on a collection of her essays on carework and the ethics of care.

Heather Love is R. Jean Brownlee Term Associate Chair at the University of Pennsylvania where she teaches courses in twentieth-century literature and culture, queer studies, disability studies, film, and critical theory. She is the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (2007) and the editor of a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies on the scholarship and legacy of Gayle Rubin ("Rethinking Sex"). She is currently at work on a book on the politics of social stigma and the problem of comparison in the fields of disability studies, queer theory, and critical race studies ("The Stigma Archive"). 

Julie E. Maybee is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Lehman College, City University of New York (CUNY).  She is the Coordinator of the new Disability Studies Minor at Lehman, and is affiliated with the Masters in Disability Studies Program in the School of Professional Studies at CUNY along with the Department of African and African American Studies at Lehman. Her interest in Africana philosophy and 19th Century Continental philosophy—especially Hegel (Picturing Hegel: An Illustrated Guide to Hegel’s Encyclopaedia Logic, Lexington Books, 2009) and the post-Hegelians—led to a broader exploration of the lived experiences of social identities—race, class, disability, ethnicity, gender—as well as the disadvantage and discrimination that accompany those identities in our society.  Her most recent piece, “The Political is Personal:  Mothering at the Intersection of Acquired Disability, Gender and Race” (in Disability and Mothering: Liminal Spaces of Embodied Knowledge, Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson and Jen Cellio eds., Syracuse University Press, 2011), explores some complexities of identity created by the social consequences of becoming the mother of a newly disabled, black daughter.

Anne McClintock's research interests include: Victorian British Literature and Culture, Twentieth Century American Culture and Literature, Gender Studies and Theories of Sexuality, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature and Culture, Irish Literature and Culture.  She is the author of Simone de Beauvoir (1990); Olive Shreiner (1991); Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (1995) and co-editor of Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Postcolonial Perspectives (1997); and Of Race and Queer Sexuality (1999).

Susan Meiselas' first major photographic essay focused on the lives of women doing striptease at New England country fairs. She photographed the carnivals during three consecutive summers while teaching photography in the New York public schools. Carnival Strippers was published in 1976, and a selection of the images was installed at the Whitney Museum of Art in June 2000. Meiselas received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College, New York, and her MA in visual education from Harvard University. She joined Magnum Photos in 1976. Best known for her coverage of the insurrection in Nicaragua and for her documentation of human rights issues in Latin America, her second monograph, Nicaragua, June 1978-July 1979, appeared in 1981.

Meiselas edited and contributed to El Salvador: The Work of 30 Photographers and edited Chile from Within, which features work by photographers living under the regime of Augusto Pinochet. She has co-directed two films: Living at Risk: The Story of a Nicaraguan Family (1986) and Pictures from a Revolution (1991) with Richard P. Rogers and Alfred Guzzetti. In 1997 she completed a six-year project curating a 100-year visual history of Kurdistan. Her 2001 monograph, Pandora's Box, which explores a New York S&M club, was followed by Encounters with the Dani, an account of an indigenous people living in Indonesia's Papua highlands.

Meiselas received the Robert Capa Gold Medal for 'outstanding courage and reporting' from the Overseas Press Club for her work in Nicaragua; the Maria Moors Cabot Prize from Columbia University for her coverage of Latin America; and, in 2005, the Cornell Capa Infinity Award. In 1992 she was named a MacArthur Fellow.

Nancy K. Miller is currently working on a project about the experience of girls and young women in the American 1950s, about private life and middlebrow culture; also a project on the nature of extreme experience and its recording in testimony and other documents. Continuing interests include questions of autobiography and memoir, feminist theory, women's writing, trauma and testimony.  Her publications include:  Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts. New York and London: Routledge, 1991; French Dressing: Women, Men and Ancien Régime Fiction. New York and London: Routledge, 1995; and Bequest and Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parent's Death. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996; paperback edition, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.

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, and is currently completing a book on the significance of deafness to the emergence of communication engineering in the telephone system. Articles from this project can be found in Social Text, differences, and The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies. Her new research concerns the history of talking books, reading machines, and “print disability.” 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.

Karen Newman's books include Fetal Positions: Individualism, Science, Visuality (Stanford, 1996); Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago, 1991); and Shakespeare's Rhetoric of Comic Character: Dramatic Convention in Classical and Renaissance Comedy (Methuen, 1985) and Cultural Capitals: Early Modern London and Paris (Princeton, 2007). Her articles have appeared in various journals, including PMLA, Shakespeare Quarterly and Renaissance Drama. She is on the editorial board of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies and has held numerous fellowships including a Guggenheim and an NEH.

Robert Nichols is an Assistant Professor of Political Theory in the Departments of Political Science and Philosophy at the University of Alberta (Canada).  He received his PhD in 2009 as a Trudeau Doctoral Scholar in Political Theory at the University of Toronto and, that same year was awarded an I.W.Killam Postdoctoral Fellowship in Philosophy. His areas of research include late modern and contemporary continental philosophy (especially Heidegger and Foucault), as well as the study of imperialism, settler colonialism, anti-imperial resistance and the politics of indigeneity. Work of his on these topics has recently appeared in journals such as Foucault Studies; Law, Culture and the Humanities; Philosophy Today; Ethnicities and Contemporary Political Theory.

Lorie Novak's photographs, installations, and Internet projects have been in numerous exhibitions including solo exhibitions at ArtSway, Hampshire, England; The International Center of Photography, NY; Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, AZ; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Houston Center for Photography; Breda Fotografica, the Netherlands; Jayne Baum Gallery, NY; University Art Museum, California State Univ. Long Beach; Addison Gallery, Andover, MA; and Stanford University Art Museum. Her work has been in group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, NY; The Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC.; Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Jewish Museum, NY; and The Southeast Museum of Photography, Daytona Beach, FL; among others. She has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant, and residencies at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center, MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Djerassi Foundation, and ArtSway. Her photographs are in numerous permanent collections including the Art Institute of Chicago; Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, AZ; Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, MA; George Eastman House, Rochester, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum of Modern Art, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Lorie Novak is co-director of Urban Ensemble through which Tisch School Of the Arts students engage in community-based arts projects, and she has also initiated the community collaboration program in the Photography and Imaging Department.

Julie Passanante Elman is a Visiting Assistant Professor in New York University's Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies within the interdisciplinary Department of Social and Cultural Analysis. While at NYU, Elman has developed the university's first-ever undergraduate course in disability studies and served as a member of the NYU Council for the Study of Disability. Elman received her Ph.D. in American Studies from The George Washington University in 2009. Her research focuses broadly on 20th century media and cultural history, American literature, queer theory and disability studies. Elman's current book project, Troubling Teen: Disability, Sexuality, and the Rehabilitation of American Youth is a cultural history of the "developing teenager" that reveals the centrality of rehabilitation in the establishment of American norms of self-regulating citizenship, embodiment, sexuality, and emotional maturity in the late 20th century. Her work has appeared in Television & New Media and is forthcoming in The Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies and the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry. For additional information about her research and teaching, see www.juliepelman.com and her course  blog Cripping the City (http://disabilitysexuality.blogspot.com), a forum for her students' work about accessibility issues in New York City.

Victoria Pitts-Taylor is Professor of Sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. At the Graduate Center, she is also Director of the Center for the Study of Women and Society and Coordinator of the Women’s Studies Doctoral Certificate Program. She is author of two books, In the Flesh: the Cultural Politics of Body Modification and Surgery Junkies: Wellness and Pathology in Cosmetic Culture, as well as Editor of The Cultural Encyclopedia of the Body. She is currently the Chair of the Section on the Body and Embodiment of the American Sociological Association. Her current projects include a book for the Routledge Series Intergrating Science and Culture, on brain science in everyday life.

Professor Rembis is the Associate Director of the Center for Disability Studies and Adjunct Professor in the Department of History at the University at Buffalo. Before his current appointment, he was the inaugural (2010-2011) visiting fellow in the Center for Disability Studies and the Department of History at the UB. 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 Disability and Society, Disability Studies Quarterly, Sexuality and Disability, Journal of Postsecondary Education and Disability, History of Psychology, the Journal of Illinois History, and the edited anthology, Popular Eugenics, 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 now available from University of Illinois Press. Professor Rembis earned the PhD in History from the University of Arizona.

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. 

Barbara D. Savage is Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where she has taught since 1995. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in twentieth century African American history; the history of American religious and social reform movements; and the history of the relationship between media and politics.

She is the author of Broadcasting Freedom: Radio, War, and the Politics of Race, 1938-1948 (University of North Carolina Press, 1999) which won the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library Award for the best book in American history in the period 1916-1966. In addition, she is co-editor of Women and Religion in the African Diaspora (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), a collection of new work from scholars associated with a three-year Ford Funded project coordinated with Professor R. Marie Griffith at Princeton University.

Her most recent book, Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion (Harvard University Press, 2008), is an historical examination of debates about the public responsibility of black churches and the role of religion in racial leadership. Savage has published several articles related to that project, including "Biblical and Historical Imperatives: Toward a History of Ideas about the Political Role of Black Churches," in African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Textures, ed., Vincent Wimbush (New York: Continuum Press, 2000) and "W. E. B. Du Bois and 'the Negro Church,'" Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (March, 2000).

She was awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship by the Smithsonian Institution for work on her first book. She also has received fellowship awards for work on her current project from: the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, Harvard University; the Princeton University Center for the Study of Religion; and the Scholars-in-Residence Program at the Schomburg Center on Black Culture.

Savage received her doctorate in history from Yale in 1995, and also holds a law degree from Georgetown University and an undergraduate degree from the University of Virginia. Prior to entering graduate school, she worked in Washington, DC, as a Congressional staff member and as a member of the staff of the Children's Defense Fund. During graduate school, she served as Director of Federal Relations, Office of the General Counsel at Yale University.

At Penn, among other University commitments, she served as a member of the recent Presidential Search Committee. She also is a faculty member for the National Endowment for the Humanities College and University Teachers' Institute on the Civil Rights Movement, held during the summers at Harvard University's W. E. B. Du Bois Institute.

Michael Schwartz, a deaf lawyer, is an associate professor of law and has been the director of the Disability Rights Clinic in the Office of Clinical Legal Education at the Syracuse University College of Law since August 2004.  Schwartz received his Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Brandeis University and a Master of Arts degree in Theater Arts from Northwestern University.  He then joined the National Theater of the Deaf and toured the United States as D’Artagnan in Dumas’s The Three Musketeers.  When his tour ended, Schwartz enrolled in New York University School of Law where he obtained his JD degree and joined the New York State Bar.  His first legal position was a judicial clerkship in the chambers of Federal District Judge Vincent L. Broderick of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.  After his clerkship, Schwartz joined the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office as an Assistant District Attorney in the Office’s Appeals Bureau and served seven and one-half years.  He then became a Trial Attorney in the Employment Litigation Section of the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice in Washington, D.C.  Shortly thereafter he got married and relocated to New York City to practice law on his own for three years.  During this time he was admitted to the Bars of the States of New Jersey and Connecticut.  Schwartz then joined the Civil Rights Bureau of the New York State Department of Law as an Assistant Attorney General and successfully litigated the Office’s first Americans with Disabilities Act case, which established the right of a State Attorney General to bring an action under the ADA on behalf of the state’s residents with disabilities.  Schwartz then left the Department of Law, obtained his LL.M degree from Columbia University School of Law, and joined the faculty at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York for the next four years.  Schwartz then joined the law faculty at Syracuse University in 2004 and received his Ph.D. degree in Education with a concentration in Disability Studies from Syracuse University in May 2006. 

Tobin Siebers is V. L. Parrington Collegiate Professor, Professor of English and Art and Design at the University of Michigan. He has been a fellow of the Michigan Society of Fellows and the John Simon Memorial Guggenheim Foundation and a Visiting Scholar at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris.  His major publications include The Mirror of Medusa  (California 1983), The Romantic Fantastic  (Cornell 1984), The Ethics of Criticism  (Cornell 1988), Morals and Stories  (Columbia 1992), Cold War Criticism and the Politics of Skepticism  (Oxford 1993), The Subject and Other Subjects: On Ethical, Aesthetic, and Political Identity  (Michigan 1998), Among Men (Nebraska 1999), Disability Theory (Michigan 2008),  Zerbrochene Schönheit (Transcript 2008) and Disability Aesthetics (Michigan, 2010).  He is also the editor of Religion and the Authority of the Past  (Michigan 1993), Heterotopia: Postmodern Utopia and the Body Politic  (Michigan 1994), and The Body Aesthetic: From Fine Art to Body Modification (Michigan 2000). His recent work on disability studies has been published in 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. He is currently at work on a project on the visual representation of female mental disability.

Irina Carlota (Lotti) Silber received her PhD from NYU and is currently an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the City College of New York (CCNY) in the Department of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, which is housed at the Center for Worker Education. She is also the Director of the MA Program in the Study of the Americas. She is the recipient of various dissertation fellowships (i.e. Fulbright Hays, IAF, OAS, Charlotte Newcombe) and postdoctoral fellowships (Rockefeller Fellow at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, Rockefeller Fellow at Berkeley –declined) and has most recently received several CUNY wide grants. Lotti has published her work in Gender & History, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and in peer reviewed volumes published by Duke University Press, Rutgers University Press, University of Pittsburgh Press, and PAIDOS (Argentina).  Her book, Everyday Revolutionaries: Gender, Violence and Disillusionment in Postwar El Salvador is recently published by Rutgers University Press in their Genocide, Political Violence, and Human Rights Series. She currently has two projects underway, one that continues her long interest in the entanglements of war and displacement through a comparative study of Central American migration in Europe, and a second project entitled The Texture of Illness which explores childhood genetic difference. 

Professor Valerie Smith returned to Princeton from UCLA in 2001 and is the director of the Center for African American Studies. She is a specialist in African American literature and culture, with specific interests in black feminist theory and film studies. She received a Guggenheim Felllowship in 2005-06 and an Alphonse G. Fletcher, Sr. Fellowship in 2006-07.  At present, she is completing a book on the Civil Rights Movement in cultural memory.

LEO SPITZER is the Vernon Professor of History Emeritus at Dartmouth College and Visiting Professor of History, Columbia University.  Born in La Paz, Bolivia to refugee parents who fled Nazi persecution in Austria, he now lives in the U.S., splitting his home residency between Norwich, Vermont and New York city.  Trained in comparative history, he received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Brandeis University and his Masters and Doctorate from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.  His interests range widely – from questions concerning emancipation and reactions to exclusion and domination in Latin America, Africa, and Central Europe, to issues of historical memory, refugeehood, and representations of trauma in photography, film and video.  He is the author of Hotel Bolivia: The Culture of Memory in a Refuge from Nazism.  He has also written Lives in Between: Assimilation and Marginality in Austria, Brazil and West Africa; The Creoles of Sierra Leone: Responses to Colonialism; and is co-editor with Mieke Bal and Jonathan Crewe of Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present.  A former Chair of the History Department and the founding Chair of the Jewish Studies Program at Dartmouth, he was the Lucius Littauer Fellow at the National Humanities Center (1992-93) and has been the recipient of John Simon Guggenheim, Ford, Social Science Research Council, American Council of Learned Societies, Whiting, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Rockefeller/Bellagio, and Bogliasco Foundation awards and fellowships.  In 1996-98, he was a National Humanities Center Distinguished Lecturer. In collaboration with Marianne Hirsch his most recent book, Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory, is forthcoming in 2009 from the University of California Press. 

Joseph Straus is Distinguished Professor of Music at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of numerous books and articles on topics in twentieth-century music, including Twelve-Tone Music in America (2009), Introduction to Post-Tonal Theory (3rd ed., 2004), Stravinsky's Late Music (2001), The Music of Ruth Crawford Seeger (1995), and Remaking the Past: Musical Modernism and the Influence of the Tonal Tradition (1990). His most recent publications, including Extraordinary Measures: Disability in Music (Oxford University Press, 2011), are among the first to bring to music the insights of Disability Studies. He is a former President of the Society for Music Theory.

Anna Stubblefield is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Rutgers University-Newark. She is affiliated with the American Studies doctoral program, the Urban Systems doctoral program, the Department of African and African-American Studies, and the Women’s Studies program. Her research has focused on Africana philosophy and ethical issues relating to race (Ethics along the Color Line, Cornell University Press, 2005), but she has returned to her roots in recent years to work on the concept of intellect as a social construction that is entangled with race, class, and gender in the United States and to ethical issues in the provision of support services to people labeled with developmental and cognitive disabilities. She currently serves as the Faculty Adviser to the Disability Services Office at Rutgers-Newark and as an ethics consultant to agencies that provide residential, educational, and occupational support services to people labeled with cognitive disabilities. Dr. Stubblefield is a Facilitated Communication Trainer, providing motor planning support for communication and literacy for adults and children.

Marita Sturken's work spans the fields of cultural studies, visual culture, American studies, and art and technology. It is interdisciplinary with an emphasis on cultural memory, national identity, consumer culture, the social function of art, and the cultural effects of technology.

Diana Taylor is the author of Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America (1991), which won the Best Book Award given by New England Council on Latin American Studies and Honorable Mention in the Joe E. Callaway Prize for the Best Book on Drama, of Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's 'Dirty War', Duke U.P., 1997, and The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Duke U.P., 2003) which won the ATHE Research Award in Theatre Practice and Pedagogy and the Modern Language Association Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for the best book in Latin American and Spanish Literatures and Culture (2004). She is editor of Stages of Conflict: A Reader in Latin American Theatre and Performance (forthcoming Michigan U. P.) and co-editor of Holy Terrors: Latin American Women Perform (Duke U.P., 2004), Defiant Acts/Actos Desafiantes: Four Plays by Diana Raznovich, Bucknell U. P., 2002, Negotiating Performance in Latin/o America: Gender, Sexuality and Theatricality, Duke U.P., 1994, and The Politics of Motherhood: Activists from Left to Right, University Press of New England, 1997. She has edited five volumes of critical essays on Latin American, Latino, and Spanish playwrights. Her articles on Latin American and Latino performance have appeared in The Drama Review, Theatre Journal, Performing Arts Journal, Latin American Theatre Review, Estreno, Gestos, Signs, MLQ and other scholarly journals. She has also been invited to participate in discussions on the role of new technologies in the arts and humanities in important conferences and commissions in the Americas (i.e. ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure). Diana Taylor is founding Director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, funded by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.

David Wasserman is Director of Research at the Center for Ethics at Yeshiva University. He oversees the research and scholarly activities of the Center with an emphasis on the philosophical aspects of bioethics, health care ethics, and disability studies. His current projects focus on prenatal selection and parental role-morality. He publishes widely on these and other topics. At Yeshiva University, Mr. Wasserman presents his research at faculty seminars and a variety of student events. He also presents his work at a wide range of national and international conferences. Prior to joining the Center, Mr. Wasserman was a Research Scholar at the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy at the University of Maryland. He has a J.D. from the University of Michigan (Magna Cum Laude), an M.A. in psychology from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a B.A. in philosophy from Yale University. 

Laura Wexler is co-Principal Investigator of the Women, Religion and Globalization project. She is the author of Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U. S. Imperialism (University of North Carolina Press, 2000) and Pregnant Pictures (Routledge, 2000), co-authored with Sandra Matthews. Tender Violence was awarded the 2001 annual Joan Kelley Memorial Prize of the American Historical Association for the best book in women’s history and/or feminist theory. She also co-edited, along with Laura Frost, Amy Hungerford and John MacKay, the volume Interpretation and the Holocaust, a special issue of the Yale Journal of Criticism. Professor Wexler’s many other publications include a recent essay entitled “’Laughing Ben’” on ‘The Old Plantation’,” in Photography and Race Forum, edited by Elizabeth Abel and Leigh Raiford, in English Language Notes 44.2 (Fall/Winter 2006); and a recent chapter entitled “The Fair Ensemble: Kate Chopin in St. Louis in 1904,” in Haunted by Empire; Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, edited by Ann Laura Stoler (Duke University Press, 2006). Her current research centers on visual representations of the gendered politics of race in the United States and includes forthcoming studies of the writer Kate Chopin and the photographers Diane Arbus and Roman Vishniac. She co-founded, and for the past eight years has directed, the Photographic Memory Workshop at Yale. She has served on the editorial boards of American Quarterly, Genders, and the Yale Journal of Criticism. She is a member of the Steering Committee and of the Advisory Council of the Women Faculty Forum, and serves on the American Studies, Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, International Affairs, and Judaic Studies Councils.

Sarah Wilcox is Professor of Sociology, Sarah Lawrence College. She specializes in medical sociology, the sociology of science and knowledge, gender and sexuality, and the mass media.  Her current research focuses on embodiment and biological knowledge, particularly how lay and expert knowledge intersect and when and how biological ideas become salient in embodied experience, personal identities, and popular culture.  She teaches courses on embodiment, medical technologies, health policy and health activism, gender and mass media, and she is developing a new course in disability studies.

Deb Willis has an affiliated appointment with the College of Arts and Sciences, Africana Studies. She was a 2005 Guggenheim Fellow and Fletcher Fellow, and a 2000 MacArthur Fellow, as well as the 1996 recipient of the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation award. She has pursued a dual professional career as an art photographer and as one of the nation's leading historians of African American photography and curator of African American culture. Exhibitions of her work include: A Sense of Place, Frick, University of Pittsburgh, 2005; Regarding Beauty, University of Wisconsin, 2003; Embracing Eatonville, Light Works, Syracuse, NY, 2003-4; HairStories, Scottsdale Contemporary Art Museum, Scottsdale, AZ 2003-4; The Comforts of Home, Hand Workshop Art Center, Richmond, VA, 1999; Re/Righting History: Counternarratives by Contemporary African-American Artists, Katonah Museum of Art, 1999; Memorable Histories and Historic Memories, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 1998; Cultural Baggage, Rice University, Houston, TX, 1995. Her curated Exhibitions include: Engulfed by Katrina: Photographs before and After the Storm, Nathan Cummings Foundation, and Imagining Families—Images and Voices and Reflections in Black. Other notable projects include The Black Female Body A Photographic History with Carla Williams (Temple University Press, Philadephia, 2002); A Small Nation of People: W.E.B. DuBois and the Photographs from the Paris Exposition (Amistad Press, 2003); Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers - 1840 to the Present (New York: W.W. Norton); Visual Journal: Photography in Harlem and DC in the Thirties and Forties (Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC, 1996); Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography (The New Press, New York, NY, 1994); and VANDERZEE: The Portraits of James VanDerZee (Harry Abrams Publishing, New York, NY, 1993).

Penny Wolfson won a National Magazine Award in Feature Writing in 2001 for an essay in The Atlantic Monthly called “Moonrise,” which has since been anthologized in several collections, including Best American Essays. Her memoir, Moonrise: One Family, Genetic Identity and Muscular Dystrophy, was published by St. Martin’s Press in 2003.  Her writing on disability has also appeared in The New York Times, Good Housekeeping, Exceptional Parent, and other publications, and is included in Stories of Illness and Healing: Women Write their Bodies. She has a BA and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, where she taught nonfiction writing from 2001 to 2010. She has also taught in the Narrative Medicine program at Columbia, and is now working on a paper on the history of wheelchairs.

Sophia Isako Wong is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Brooklyn Campus of Long Island University in New York, NY, USA. She has published on duties of justice to persons with intellectual disabilities, comparisons between sexism and discrimination against people with intellectual disabilities, and how the availability of PGD (preimplantation genetic diagnosis) affects the reproductive autonomy of prospective parents. Her current research analyzes the work of children and adolescents who provide care to their siblings, parents and other family members. She also enjoys writing short stories and making stained glass mosaics.