Professor David Gerber (University of Buffalo) discusses this classic 1946 film about servicemen readjusting to civilian life after World War II.

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Dr. David Gerber is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of History and Emeritus Director of the Center for Disability Studies at the University of Buffalo. He has authored and edited numerous books, including Disabled Veterans in History (2000, revised and expanded 2012), and has published numerous essays about disability, immigration, and ethnicity. Among his many accolades, Professor Gerber was honored with the Annual Senior Scholar Award by the Society for Disability Studies in 2015, and he published an accompanying essay, “Disability Scholars as World Disrupters and Worldmakers,” in Disability Studies Quarterly in 2017. 

[Music: Easygoing by Nicolai Heidlas Music | https://www.hooksounds.com | Creative Commons — Attribution 4.0 International]

Dr. Laurel Daen discusses her award-winning article.

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Dr. Laurel Daen is a National Endowment for the Humanities postdoctoral fellow at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. Laurel’s current research focuses on disability in early North America (to 1840). She is writing a book about disability, authority, and state-building in the early national period. She has also published articles and book chapters on “invalid” pensions for American Revolutionary War veterans, inventions for disability in early nineteenth-century Britain, and the early nineteenth-century American artist and performer Martha Ann Honeywell. This latter article won the Disability History Association’s 2018 Outstanding Article or Book Chapter Award and is the subject of this podcast.

[Music: Easygoing by Nicolai Heidlas Music | https://www.hooksounds.com | Creative Commons — Attribution 4.0 International]

Dr. Nancy Hansen (University of Manitoba) discusses disability history and activism in Canada.

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Dr. Nancy Hansen is an Associate Professor and Director of the Interdisciplinary Master’s Program in Disability Studies at the University of Manitoba. Nancy obtained a PhD (Human Geography) from the University of Glasgow and her research interests in disability studies include disability in spaces of culture education, literacy, social policy, employment, healthcare access, and experiences of disabled and LGBTQ communities in post-conflict areas. Nancy is a former member of the CAUT Working Group Academics with Disabilities and Equity Committee, and former President of the Canadian Disability Studies Association. Nancy received an Einstein research fellowship examining Disability Studies and the Legacy of Nazi Eugenics and the ICUF Sprott Asset Management Scholarship examining disability history. Nancy has written numerous book chapters and contributed to various international academic journals. She is co-editor of The Routledge History of Disability with Roy Hanes and Ivan Brown (2017) and Untold Stories: A Canadian Disability History Reader with Roy Hanes and Diane Driedger (2018). She can be reached on Twitter @DrNancyHansen.

Dr. Laura Micheletti Puaca discusses her chapter, “The Largest Occupational Group of All the Disabled: Homemakers with Disabilities and Vocational Rehabilitation in Postwar America,” which was published in the collection Disabling Domesticity (2017) and won one of the Disability History Association’s publication awards.

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Dr. Laura Micheletti Puaca is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Minor Program in Women’s and Gender Studies at Christopher Newport University. Her research interests include U.S. women’s history, disability studies, and the history of science and technology. Laura’s recent book, Searching for Scientific Womanpower: Technocratic Feminism and the Politics of National Security, 1940-1980 (University of North Carolina Press, 2014), won the 2017 History of Science Society’s Margaret W. Rossiter Prize for best book on the history of women in science. She also won the 2017 Disability History Association’s Publication Award for Best Article/Book Chapter for her essay, “The Largest Occupational Group of All the Disabled: Homemakers with Disabilities and Vocational Rehabilitation in Postwar America” that appeared in Michael Rembis, ed. Disabling Domesticity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Building on this research, Laura is currently working on a new book-length project examining disability and domesticity in the post-World War II United States.

Dr. Hannah Thompson discusses her new book, Reviewing Blindness in French Fiction, 1789-2013.

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Dr Hannah Thompson ([email protected]) is a Reader in French at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has published widely on nineteenth-century French prose fiction, with particular reference to gender, sexuality and the non-normative body (Naturalism Redressed: Identity and Clothing in the Novels of Emile Zola (Oxford: Legenda, 2004); Taboo: Corporeal Secrets in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford: Legenda, 2013)). Her third monograph, Reviewing Blindness in French Fiction (Palgrave, 2017), marks the beginning of a new research interest in the intersections between Critical Disability Studies and French Studies. Hannah is currently working on creative audio description and the notion of ‘blindness gain’. She is the author of the popular blog Blind Spot (https://hannah-thompson.blogspot.co.uk/). Follow her on twitter @BlindSpotHannah.

Haley Gienow-McConnell discusses her research on representations of disability in the hit 1970s TV show The Waltons.

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Haley Gienow-McConnell is a PhD candidate at York University in Toronto, Ontario. Her research interests include cultural histories of disability, deaf histories, and histories of women’s health and disability. She is a fluent ASL-user, and lives with her deaf husband and their daughter in Thorold, Ontario. Haley also recently published a deaf/disability positive children’s book entitled “A Sense of Love.” She can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter at @HaleyAnnGM.