Mel Chen
University of California - Berkeley
Mel
Y. Chen is Associate Professor of Gender & Women's Studies at U.C.
Berkeley and, in good interdisciplinary fashion, enjoys rubbernecking
between the department and Berkeley's Center for Race and Gender, the
Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society, and the Haas
Institute for a Fair and Just Society (Disability Studies and LGBTQ
Citizenship Research Clusters). Mel’s recent book,Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Duke
University Press, 2012), explores questions of racialization, queering,
disability, and affective economies in animate and inanimate “life.”
Alison Kafer
Southwestern University
Alison
Kafer is Associate Professor and Chair of the Feminist Studies program
at Southwestern University, where she also teaches courses in the
Environmental Studies and Race and Ethnic Studies programs. The author
of Feminist, Queer, Crip (Indiana UP, 2013), Alison gets a kick out of teaching about feminism to undergraduates living in the heart of Texas.
Bradley Lewis
New York University
Bradley
Lewis MD, PhD is a practicing psychiatrist and an associate professor
at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. He has
affiliated appointments in the Department of Social and Cultural
Analysis and the Department of Psychiatry. Lewis writes and teaches at
the interface of medicine, humanities, and cultural/disability studies.
He is an associate editor for the Journal of Medical Humanities and his recent books are Narrative Psychiatry: How Stories Shape Clinical Practice and Depression: Integrating Science, Culture, and Humanities.
His current research project is devoted to the role of art, religion,
and politics for happiness and contemporary cares of the self.
Ellen Samuels
University of Wisconsin - Madison
Ellen
Samuels is Assistant Professor in the Departments of Gender &
Women's Studies and English at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Her book Fantasies of Identification: Disability, Gender, Race is
forthcoming from NYU Press in 2014 and she has published numerous
articles on the intersections of disability, race, and sexuality in
literature and culture. She discloses her disability on a regular basis
and can do so in haiku form upon request.
Katherine D. Seelman
University of Pittsburgh
Kate
Seelman is Associate Dean of Disability Programs and Professor of
Rehabilitation Science and Technology at the University of Pittsburgh.
She is adviser to the Students with Disability Advocacy at Pitt She has a
beaten track to and from WHO in Geneva to work on the World Report on
Disability and hearing aids for low and middle income countries,
technology which she has used most of her life. Her latest publication
is entitled: "Should Robots be Personal Assistants?"