Author: Caroline Lieffers

The Disability History Association is pleased to announce that Committed: Remembering Native Kinship in and Beyond Institutions by Susan Burch has been granted this year’s Outstanding Book Award.

The committee described the work as “a beautifully written and constructed book…that transforms the way that scholars think about and do “institutional histories.” It is “a powerful book that makes a huge contribution to the field” and “sheds light on the entanglement of settler colonialism, racism, ableism and sexism.” “The author does not write a top-down history but rather provides a microhistorical approach, focusing on the lived stories.” Committed is an “innovative and an important contribution to the field as Native American history has scarcely been explored through the lens of disability.” “More than traditional ‘history,’ it is a remembering, a reinvigoration of cultural memory nearly lost due to inaccessible institutional archives and direct oral traditions.”

The DHA is also pleased to announce that Familial Fitness: Disability, Adoption, and Family in Modern America by Sandra M. Sufian has been awarded this year’s Honorable Mention.

The committee shared the following assessment: “Sufian’s study…represents intersectional history at its best by unpacking numerous entanglements such as race, eugenics, and epidemics…The narrative is persuasive in showing how dominant views on normality and health in American society have shifted throughout the century.” Familial Fitness is a “masterful book…The analysis is clear, compelling, and well substantiated.” The book is “a well-argued and rigorously researched history of disability and adoption in the United States. The author shows clear mastery over the legal and systematic structures that dominate Modern American adoption processes.”

Congratulations!

The Disability History Association (DHA) would like to congratulate Hannah Zeavin, winner of the 2022 DHA Outstanding Article or Book Chapter Award for “Hot and Cool Mothers,” differences 32, no. 3 (2021): 53–84.

Zeavin’s sophisticated article rose to the top of a highly competitive and wide-ranging group of submissions. Committee members described Zeavin’s work as “beautifully written and researched,” “theoretically adept,” and “exceptional in its braiding of feminist history, histories of disabled children, the ‘creation’ of disability, affect theory, discourse analysis, and histories of capitalism, race, and 20th century America.” Zeavin’s “fascinating” and “remarkable” article explores “how queerness and neurodivergence are said to be ‘produced’ in ways which stigmatize a variety of mothers. It shows, as such, how disability and disabled children are affectively and linguistically utilized as a tool for misogyny, racism, and ableism, pushing the field to think about disability more broadly than impairment.” The Committee particularly commended Zeavin’s work for its clarity and use of primary sources, bringing “together a wide range of philosophical, pop culture, professional and pedagogical supports for its argument.”

The Honorable Mention has been awarded to Evan Sullivan for “America’s living unknown soldiers: amnesia and veteran imposters after the Great War,” First World War Studies 12, no. 2 (2021): 155-171. The Committee noted that the author’s “exploration into neuro-psychiatric wounds—and amnesia in particular—was well researched. Sullivan brought out integral questions relating to the legitimacy of hidden disabilities and the ways in which they challenged assumptions about status, gender, and race.” The article made “impressive use of primary sources,” with “fascinating and compelling” case studies that “present a more subtle understanding of a common theme in disability history – the faking of impairments and suspicion of disabled people.” The Committee also commended Sullivan’s piece for being “tightly written, comprehensive, argumentative, and chronologically clear,” noting that its “elucidations of the web of anxiety in the post-war era of disability fakery, familial grief, a national desire to ‘return’ to normalcy, and restrictive welfare are masterful.”