Emily Abel is Professor of Health Services and Women's Studies at UCLA. She is a historian by training, earning a PhD in history before completing a M.P.H. from UCLA's School of Public Health. Her scholarship at UCLA has been in the School of Public Heath and Women's Studies where by her own admission her writing has often been sharply at odds with health care professionals. Among her books are: Who Cares for the Elderly? Public Policy and the Experiences of Adult Daughters (1991), winner of the distinguished Contribution to Qualitative Gerontology Award from the American Sociological Association, Section on Aging; Hearts of Wisdom: American Women Caring for Kin, 1850-1940 (2000), selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Book for 2000; and Suffering in the Land of Sunshine: A Los Angeles Illness Narrative (2006). Her forthcoming book is Tuberculosis and the Politics of Exclusion: A History of Public Health and Migration to Los Angeles.
Helen Deutsch, Professor of English at UCLA, works at the intersection of eighteenth-century studies, gender studies, and disability studies. Her introduction to the field of disability studies followed her publication of Resemblance and Disgrace: Alexander Pope and the Deformation of Culture (1996) when this work received critical acclaim among literary scholars of disability across the country. Other recent books include: Loving Dr. Johnson (2005); and "Defects": Engendering the Modern Body, co-edited with UCLA Professor Felicity Nussbaum (2000). She is currently working on a book on gendered subjectivity, embodiment, and intimate literary forms such as the essay and the verse epistle. Her ongoing research questions include the cultural connection between authorship and disease, the interplay between visual and printed cults of authorship both ancient and modern, and the formative relationship between bodily difference and modern individuality
Paul K. Longmore is Professor of History and Director of the Institute on Disability at San Francisco State University, where he specializes in Early American history and the history of people with disabilities. Among his books are: The Invention of George Washington (1998) and The New Disability History: American Perspectives, co-edited with Lauri Umansky (2001). He is currently co-editing a book series, The History of Disability, for NYU Press and is completing a book on telethons and the framing of disability in American culture. Stanley Kutler, former editor of the journal Reviews in American History, praised as “pioneering” Longmore's call in the mid-1980s for historians to examine the history of disability. In 2004 in that same journal, a review of Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability (University Press, 2003), declared, “Probably more than anyone, Longmore has been responsible for bringing disability studies to the field of history.”
Susan Schweik is Associate Professor of English and Co-Director of Disability Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Her current academic interests include 20th Century American Literature, Disability Studies, Cultural Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Poetry. She is the author of: A Gulf So Deeply Cut: American Women Poets and the Second World War (1991) and the forthcoming The American Ugly Laws (2007), a social and cultural history of an ordinance adopted by many American cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that prohibited “diseased,” “maimed,” and “deformed” people from exposing themselves to public view. A former Presidential Chair in Undergraduate Education for Disability Studies at U.C. Berkeley, she has been involved with the development of disability studies at Berkeley for over ten years, including the creation of their minor in disability studies, which was the first in the UC system and among the first nationally.