DHA Board of Directors

Catherine Kudlick: Chair of the DHA Board of Directors Catherine Kudlick is a professor of history at the University of California, Davis. In the area of disability history she has published a book (with Zina Weygand) Reflections: the Life and Writings of a Young Blind Woman in Post-Revolutionary France (NYU Press, 2001, French translation 2004) and a number of articles, the most important being “Disability History: Why We Need Another ‘Other’,” American Historical Review (June 2003). Her current research explores attitudes toward blind people and blindness in modern France and America. She served as a board member of the Society for Disability Studies 2003-2006.

Audra Jennings: Secretary of the DHA Audra Jennings is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at The Ohio State University. She is working on her dissertation, tentatively titled, “With Minds Fixed on the Horrors of War: Liberalism and Disability Activism, 1940-1960.” She is the recipient of grants from both the Truman and Roosevelt Libraries, the William Green Memorial Fellowship, and the 2006 Truman Library Institute Dissertation Year Fellowship.

Sandy Sufian: DHA Treasurer Sandy Sufian teaches history of medicine and disability at University of Illinois-Chicago School of Medicine. She has adjunct appointments in the Department of Disability and Human Development and the History Department at UIC as well. She is the author of Healing the Land and the Nation: Malaria and the Zionist Project in Palestine, 1920-1947 (University of Chicago Press, 2007) and the co-editor of Reapproaching Borders: New Perspectives on the Study of Israel-Palestine (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007). She is the founder of the Global Network of Researchers on HIV/AIDS in the Middle East and North Africa.

Susan Burch: DHA Board Member Susan Burch teaches and studies American and Russian Deaf and Disability history. She currently teaches history at the University of Aberdeen [UK]. Her most recent book, co-authored with Hannah Joyner, is entitled Unspeakable: The Life Story of Junius Wilson (University of North Carolina Press, 2007). An anthology on Deaf and Disability Studies, co-edited with Alison Kafer, will be published with Gallaudet University Press. As the editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of American Disability History (with Facts on File) Susan always is looking for more gifted authors. Please contact her if you're interesting in writing entries for this project.

Phil Ferguson: DHA Board Member Phil Ferguson is the E. Desmond Lee Endowed Professor for the Education of Children with Disabilities at the University of Missouri St. Louis. He is the author of a book on history of institutions for people with severe intellectual disabilities in the 19th and early 20th century, Abandoned to their fate: Social policy and practice toward severely disabled people, 1820 to 1820 (Temple Univ. Press, 1994) and a review of the history of professional portrayals of families of disabled children, “Mapping the family: Disability studies and the exploration of the parental response to disability” that appears in the Handbook of Disability Studies (Sage, 2001). He is a past president of the Society for Disability Studies. His current research focuses on the history of special education in the early 20th century.

Wendy Gagen: DHA Board Member Wendy Gagen is a researcher and teacher at the Peninsula Medical School in the UK. She teaches social, cultural and medical history, and researches various areas of disability history including issues around masculinity, the body, medical ethics and the construction of medical knowledge. Her most recent publications include ‘Remastering the Body, Renegotiating Gender: Physical Disability and Masculinity during the First World War, the Case of J. B. Middlebrook’, European Review of History December 2007 (Volume 14 Issue 4), 525-541, and ‘Ethics, Justification, and the Prevention of Spina Bifida’, Journal of Medical Ethics September 2007 (33), 501-507, co-written with Dr Jeffrey Bishop.

Paul K. Longmore: DHA Board Member Paul K. Longmore, Professor of History and Director of the Institute on Disability at San Francisco State University, specializes in Early American history and the history of people with disabilities. He earned his Ph.D. at the Claremont Graduate School and his B.A. and M.A. at Occidental College. Longmore's publications include The Invention of George Washington (University of California Press, 1988; pb. University Press of Virginia, 1998) and Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability (Temple University Press, 2003). With Lauri Umansky, Longmore co-edited The New Disability History: American Perspectives (New York University Press, 2001), an anthology of essays, and is co-editing a book series, The History of Disability, for NYU Press. Longmore has also written articles in scholarly journals and newspapers on themes related to Early American history and to the history of people with disabilities and their contemporary civil rights struggle. He has taught at Stanford University, the University of Southern California, and the California Polytechnic University at Pomona.

San Francisco State University's Institute on Disability is a multidisciplinary research, curriculum-development, and community-service program. From 1983 to 1986, Longmore served as the administrator of the Program in Disability and Society at the University of Southern California, one of the first disability studies projects in the United States.

From 1990 to 1993 he held an Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at Stanford University. He obtained a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to conduct in 2000 the first NEH Summer Institute on Disability Studies. He received fellowships from the Mount Vernon Ladies Association, the Huntington Library, and the H. B Earhart Foundation for his Research on George Washington. He won grants from the National Institute of Disability and Rehabilitation Research to examine the impact of disability studies curricula and the U.S. Department of Education to direct a mentoring project to facilitate the transition of students with disabilities from college to careers. In addition, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded him a Focus Grant to create the Bay Area Inter-University Disability Studies Consortium and an individual fellowship to complete his book on telethons and the uses of disability in American culture.

In March 2005, he received the Henry B. Betts Award, given annually by the American Association of Persons with Disabilities and the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago to “honor an individual whose work and scope of influence have significantly improved the quality of life for people with disabilities in the past, and will be a force for change in the future.” The award carries with it an unencumbered grant of $50,000.

Penny L. Richards: DHA Board Member Penny L. Richards is a research scholar affiliated with UCLA's Center for the Study of Women. She earned graduate degrees in Geography (MS, University of Wisconsin, 1990) and Education (Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1996). Since 2001 Richards has co-edited H-Disability, an H-Net listserv for historians of disability. Richards' research interests include nineteenth-century American families and developmental disability, literary representations of disability, disability and immigration, and parental narratives.

Robyn Fishman: Student representative Robyn Fishman is a graduate student at California State University Long Beach. This year she is teaching in France at the Institut National des Sciences Appliquees in Rouen while continuing her research at the local hospital. Her work focuses on how race and gender affect psychiatric diagnosis in the Nineteenth century.