Emer Lucey (University of Wisconsin-Madison) discusses her dissertation on memoirs and guidebooks by and for parents of children with disabilities.
Episode Image: Clara Park’s The Siege (1967), one of the first parents memoirs about a child with autism. The cover shows a black and white image of two blonde girls against a blue background. The text reads, “The story of Elly, withdrawn behind the invisible walls of autism, and her parents’ loving struggle to reach her.”
Emer Lucey is a PhD candidate in History of Science, Medicine, and Technology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Emer’s dissertation, “Constructing Childhood Disabilities,” examines the history of Down syndrome and autism as paradigmatic childhood developmental disabilities in the United States in the mid-to-late twentieth century. She can be reached via email at lucey@wisc.edu and found on twitter @emerlu.
Coreen McGuire (Durham University) discusses her award-winning work on technology and the categorization of disability.
Episode Image 1: A mosaic of health-related posters. One poster, for example, is an advertisement for Chesterfield cigarettes featuring Santa Claus. Another poster shows a shirtless man flexing his muscles, and the text reads “Healthy Looks Can Hide Tuberculosis.”
Episode Image 2: A close up of a particular poster. It has white text on a red background. The text repeats the words “I can’t breathe” twelve times. On the final line, the text fades away during the word “can’t.”
Coreen McGuire completed her PhD on the measurement of hearing loss in the British Telephone System at the University of Leeds in 2016. Following this, she took up a postdoctoral position at the University of Bristol, where she developed her research by exploring the measurement of respiratory disability as part of the Life of Breath Project. She has had six original articles published in peer-reviewed journals, contributed a spotlight piece for The Lancet, written two policy papers, and completed a monograph with Manchester University Press on the measurement of hearing loss and breathlessness. Its recent publication is a significant contribution to the history of medicine, science and technology studies, and disability history. One reviewer of the manuscript wrote: Measuring Difference, Numbering Normal ‘is deeply and imaginatively researched’ and ‘makes compelling connections between hearing and breathing, while emphasizing historical contingency in the interwar period, the biology and social context of the two, and the relationship between standardization, measurement, and disability’. Her first article in the British Journal of the History of Science was co-authored with Dr Jaipreet Virdi and discussed British scientist Dr Phyllis Kerridge’s contributions to science in Britain. Their collaboration has since developed into a full monograph project on Kerridge which has been put under contract with Johns Hopkins Press for publication in 2023. Coreen has won several notable awards, including the Scottish History Society Alasdair Ross Prize for archival research and the Disability History Association prize for outstanding article or book chapter. She will take up a three-year Lectureship in Twentieth-Century British history at Durham University in September 2020.
Delia Steverson (University of Florida) discusses Delores Phillips’s The Darkest Child and other intersections between disability and African American literature and history.
Episode Image: The Darkest Child, by Delores Philips. The cover shows a young Black woman wearing a yellow hair bow and gold earrings.
Dr. Delia Steverson is an Assistant Professor of African American Literature at the University of Florida. Her book explores the nuances of how race and disability inform Black identity in 19th and 20th century African American literature. She has published in The Journal of American Culture and The South Carolina Review. Currently, she is developing a biography and a reader on the late Delores Phillips, poet and author of The Darkest Child.
Carolyn Speer and Jay Price (Wichita State University) discuss accessibility in the classroom and beyond.
Episode Image: Pizza Hut Museum, located at Wichita State University’s Innovation Campus. The museum is a small brick building with a black roof. A modern sign in front reads “Pizza Hurt Museum: The Original Pizza Hut.” Source: wichita.edu
Carolyn Speer is the Manager of Instructional Design and Access for Wichita State University. She works with a campus team of accessibility and accommodations professionals to help ensure the accessibility of academic and other university content for all university constituents. She holds CPACC certification and a Ph.D. in adult education as well as Master’s degrees in history and political science. Her professional and personal interests come together in the area of museum accessibility, and she has studied this topic extensively in the last few years. Most recently, she was involved in the Solve for X: Accessibility exhibit at the Ulrich Museum of Art on the Wichita State Campus.
Now serving as department chair, Jay M. Price directs the Local and Community History Program at Wichita State University. His publications include Temples for a Modern God: Religious Architecture in Postwar America; Gateways to the Southwest: The Story of Arizona State Parks, and several local photo histories from Arcadia Publishing. His recent projects include a study ethnic entrepreneurship in Wichita; a graphic novel that tells the story of the community through the eyes of a longhorn named Luke, and a larger study of the local Latino community.
Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy (University of New Brunswick) discusses her new book, Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean.
Episode Image: Between Fitness and Death, by Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy. The cover features an image of a group of enslaved people, who can only be seen from the waist down. One person has fallen to the ground.
Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy is a historian of the Caribbean and the Atlantic World, and Disability History at the University of New Brunswick. Her work has appeared in Slavery & Abolition, Social Identities, and several edited collections. Hunt-Kennedy is the author of Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean (University of Illinois Press, 2020) which explores the constitutive relationship between disability, anti-black racism, and slavery in the Caribbean from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. She is the primary investigator of The Slave Law Project, an ongoing research project that aims to bring worldwide access to the British Atlantic slave laws from the earliest comprehensive codes of the seventeenth century to the laws that governed emancipation in the nineteenth century. Her second book project examines old age, disability, and capitalism in the world of Atlantic slavery.
