Podcast Episode 38 – Queer Crip Histories of White Rural American Life

Ryan Lee Cartwright discusses their new book, Peculiar Places: A Queer Crip History of White Rural Nonconformity.

Episode Image: Cover of Peculiar Places by Ryan Lee Cartwright. The cover is a pastiche of craft-like images set against a beige backdrop. The images include a rough wooden cabin, a ladder, lace doilies, and a reddish mountaintop.

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About Our Guest

Ryan Lee Cartwright is an Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at UC Davis. Their research focuses on disability, gender, and sexuality on the social and spatial margins. Cartwright’s first book, Peculiar Places: A Queer Crip History of White Rural Nonconformity (University of Chicago Press, September 2021), maps racialized queer and disability histories of white social nonconformity across the rural US, from the 1910s to the 1990s. They are at work on a second book examining how, in the early-to-mid twentieth century US, chronic illness came to be understood as a gendered, racialized “social burden.” Cartwright teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on a wide range of topics, including disability studies, queer and trans history, the 1990s, research methodologies, social welfare, and landscapes and places. Cartwright is affiliated with the graduate groups in Cultural Studies and Performance Studies, as well as the designated emphasis in Feminist Theory and Research. They are also the coordinator of the Disability and Social In/Justice DHI research cluster. 

Podcast Episode 37 – Personal Assistance Services: Past, Present, and Future

Lisa Iezzoni discusses her new book, Making Their Days Happen: Paid Personal Assistance Services Supporting People with Disability Living in Their Homes and Communities

Episode Image: Cover of Making Their Days Happen, by Lisa I. Iezzoni. The cover features a painting of a wide yellow bungalow, with ramps to the front door and side deck. The house has a vast front law and neat hedges and flowerbeds, and it is set amid tall green trees.

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About Our Guest

Lisa I. Iezzoni, MD, MSc is Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and based at the Health Policy Research Center, Mongan Institute, Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Iezzoni has conducted numerous studies examining the health care experiences of persons with disability. Her book Making Their Days Happen: Paid Personal Assistance Services Supporting People with Disability Living in Their Homes and Communities was just published. During the 2022-2023 academic year, she is the Sally Starling Seaver Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Dr. Iezzoni is a member of the National Academy of Medicine in the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Podcast Episode 36 – Disability and the History of Jewish Immigration to the United States

Hannah Zaves-Greene discusses her work on Jews and the “public charge provision” in US immigration history.

Episode Image: An extract of the 1917 US Immigration Act. The text begins: “Sec. 3. That the following classes of aliens shall be excluded from admission into the United States: All Idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded persons, epileptics, insane persons; persons who have had one or more attacks of insanity at any time previously; persons of constitutional psychopathic inferiority; persons with chronic alcoholism; paupers; professional beggars; vagrants; persons afflicted with tuberculosis in any form or with a loathsome or dangerous contagious disease; persons not comprehended within any of the foregoing excluded classes who are found to be and are certified by the examining surgeon as being mentally or physically defective, such physical defect being of a nature which may affect the ability of such alien to earn a living”

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About Our Guest

Hannah Zaves-Greene received her PhD in American Jewish history from New York University’s Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, where she focused on the intersection of immigration, gender and women’s history, legal and political history, and disability studies. Her dissertation, Able to Be American: American Jews and the Public Charge Provision in United States Immigration Policy, 1891-1934, explores how American Jews responded to discrimination against immigrants on the basis of health, disability, and gender, in federal law and its enforcement. She has taught multiple courses at Cooper Union and the New School for Social Research, presented her research at national and international conferences, and delivered guest lectures for both academic and activist groups. Currently, she is a visiting professor at Sarah Lawrence College. Her public history writing appears online at the Jewniverse, the Activist History Review, and the Jewish Women’s Archive, and her academic work has been published in American Jewish History and AJS Perspectives. Additionally, she has forthcoming work in the Journal of Transnational American Studies and in an edited volume on Jewish and Irish migration with NYU Press.

Podcast Episode 35 – Hospitals, Archives, and Ethics in Southern US Disability History

Leah Richier discusses her work on mental hospitals in the US South.

Episode Image: Patient ledger from South Carolina State Hospital. Photograph of the spine of a decaying nineteenth-century ledger book. The book is sitting on a table, with a chair back and window visible in the background. Typed archival labels on the book’s spine read “SC State Hospital: Admissions and Discharges, 1860-1875, vol. 1” and “Also includes: List of Patients, 1860, 1863-1866, 1868-1869, List of Admissions 1876-1878.” Photo courtesy of Leah Richier.

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About Our Guest

Leah Richier is an independent historian with a PhD from the University of Georgia and a BA from Agnes Scott College. She has taught history courses on a wide variety of subjects at the University of Georgia, Washington & Lee University, and the University of North Florida. For two years during the pandemic, she taught high school in Houston, Texas at Awty International. Her research focuses on the lives and deaths of disabled people during the nineteenth century, especially across the U.S. South. She also works constructing digital databases of murder-suicides and lunatic asylum patients in the same century. She can be reached at richierleah@gmail.com and found on Twitter @CallMeRichier.

Podcast Episode 34 – The Life and Work of Lucy Gwin

Jim Odato discusses his new book on disability activist and Mouth editor Lucy Gwin.

Episode Image: This Brain Had a Mouth: Lucy Gwin and the Voice of Disability Nation, by James M. Odato. The cover shows a black-and-white portrait of Lucy Gwin sitting by a computer. She is a white woman with short dark hair, wearing a dark shirt.

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About Our Guest

James Odato is a graduate of University of Massachusetts Amherst and has a master’s degree in English from University at Albany. He is currently the editor of the Adirondack Explorer. Prior to this role, he was an investigative reporter at the Albany Times Union for eighteen years, and he previously worked with the Buffalo News, Schenectady Gazette, the Gannett Co., and the Adirondack Daily Enterprise. He has also taught journalism as an adjunct professor at the University at Albany, The College of Saint Rose and the Sage Colleges. He can be reached at jim@adirondackexplorer.org.