Keynote Speakers: Somatechnics 2007
C. Ben Mitchell
Keynote speakers
Professor David HowesDepartment of Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia University is the author of Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture & Social Theory (2003), co-author (with Constance Classen and Anthony Synnott) of Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (1994), and editor of Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader (2004).
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson is Associate Professor of Women’s Studies at Emory University. She is the author of Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Literature and Culture (1997), editor of Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (1996), and co-editor (with Brenda Brueggemann and Sharon Snyder) of Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities (2002).
Ewa Plonowska Ziarek is Julian Park Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of Humanities Institute at the State University of New York at Buffalo. She is the author of The Rhetoric of Failure: Deconstruction of Skepticism, Reinvention of Modernism (SUNY, 1995), An Ethics of Dissensus: Feminism, Postmodernity, and the Politics of Radical Democracy (Stanford 2001); the editor of Gombrowicz's Grimaces: Modernism, Gender, Nationality, (SUNY, 1998); and the co-editor (with Tina Chanter) of Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva's Polis (SUNY, 2005).
Michele Goodwin is the Wicklander Chair in Ethics (2004-2006) and a professor of law at DePaul College of Law. She currently directs the top-ranked Health Law Institute as well as the Center for the Study of Race & Bioethics. In 2005, she received the Excellence in Scholarship Award and in 2006 received the prestigious Humanities Award and earned the Faculty Achievement Award from DePaul University. She has also been named Woman of the Year by the Urban League, and Pioneering Woman by the Historical Society of Chicago. She is a bioethicist who researches tort and property theories in the body and biotechnology. She regularly lectures internationally on bioethics and biotechnology topics such as assisted reproductive technologies, mental health, stem cell manipulation, and organ transplantation, and has been invited to provide keynote lectures and workshops in South Korea, Finland, Austria, Australia, South Africa, Italy, England, Ireland, and a host of other nations. Her recent book, Black Markets: The Supply & Demand of Body Parts, published by Cambridge University Press this year, builds upon a career of scholarship exploring causes for organ shortages and methods to remedy that crisis. Professor Goodwin's scholarship has been cited by the Seventh Circuit, 60 Minutes, the Los Angeles Times, the Houston Chronicle, the Wisconsin State Journal, the Milwaukee Journal, and other media venues. She is a member of the executive board of the American Association of Law Schools section on law and medicine, and is a fellow of the Illinois Institute of Medicine.
David Mitchell is associate professor in the Department of Disability and Human Development, the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Disability Studies program, and the Department of Medical Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Along with his research colleague, Sharon Snyder, he has authored three books, "The Body and Physical Difference" (1997), "Narrative Prosthesis" (2000), and "Cultural Locations of Disability" (2006), and edited the book series "Corporealities: Discourses of Disability" for the University of Michigan Press that features more than 15 titles in disability studies. He founded the independent disability film company, Brace Yourselves Productions, and has produced four award winning films on disability culture, history, and art. He has also served as senior editor on Sage Press's five volume "Encyclopedia of Disability." Volume five of that collection, on which he worked as primary editor, represents the first collection of primary source documents on disability from the ancient world to the present. In 2006, he curated "The Chicago Disability History Exhibit" and "Screening Disability," the first international deaf and disability film festival in Chicago. Professor Mitchell has been a leader in inclusive education efforts and played a key role in designing the first disability studies based curriculum for elementary education in Chicago Public Schools.
Sharon Snyder is Assistant Professor of Disability Studies, Film Studies, and Medical Education at the University of Illinois, Chicago. In 1996 she earned a PhD in English and Film Studies from the University of Michigan, gave birth a second time, and, from the NICU where her daughter was undergoing multiple prolonged medical events, drafted a proposal with her colleague Dr. David Mitchell, for a book series Corporealities: Discourses of Disability. Snyder is the author, editor, or co-author on numerous essays on representation, intersecting identities, and historical work in disability studies as well as 6 books and volumes, including, most recently, Cultural Locations of Disability (University of Chicago Press). In 1993, Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, co-edited with Brenda Jo Breuggemann and Rosemarie Garland Thomson, received a Library Choice Outstanding Book of the Year Award. She has directed numerous seminars in disability history, cultural logics of eugenics, modernity and the production of contemporary ideas of disability subjectivity, and disability pedagogy, both at home and outside the U.S. Additionally, as a filmmaker for Brace Yourselves Productions her work includes: Vital Signs: Crip Culture Talks Back, A World Without Bodies, and Self-Preservation: the Art of Riva Lehrer, all of which have won prizes at international festivals including Grand Prize at Rehabilitation International's Film Festival and Festival Choices at Moscow's Breaking Down Barriers. A museum exhibit that she co-directed in 2006, The Chicago Disability History Exhibit, is in the process of being put on line while it also travels to display sites from its premiere at the Vietnam Veteran's Art Museum during Chicago's Bodies of Work Festival on Disability and Arts. Her new book assesses popular disability narratives, contrivance, and innovation in film plot and spectacle. In 2007 and 2008 she will co-direct the Second International "Screening Disability" film festival for the Chicago Cultural Center.
Lennard J. Davis is Professor in the English Department in the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In addition, he is Professor of Disability and Human Development in the School of Applied Health Sciences of the University of Illinois at Chicago, as well as Professor of Medical Education in the College of Medicine.
He is also director of Project Biocultures, a think-tank devoted to issues around the intersection of culture, medicine, disability, biotechnology, and the biosphere, author of two works on the novel*Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (Columbia U. Press, 1983, rpt. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996) and Resisting Novels: Fiction and Ideology (Routledge, 1987, rpt. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001) and co-editor of Left Politics and the Literary Profession. His works on disability include Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (Verso, 1995), which won the 1996 Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights’ annual award for the best scholarship on the subject of intolerance in North America, and The Disability Studies Reader (Routledge, 1996). His memoir My Sense of Silence (University of Illinois Press, 2000), was chosen Editor’s Choice Book for the Chicago Tribune, selected for the National Book Award for 2000, and nominated for the Book Critics Circle Award for 2000. He has appeared on National Public Radio’s Fresh Air to discuss the memoir, which describes his childhood in a Deaf family. Davis has also edited his parents’ correspondence Shall I Say a Kiss: The Courtship Letters of a Deaf Couple, 1936-38 (Gallaudet University Press, 1999). Davis is a co-founder of the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession, and he is on the board of several academic journals. Having written widely for newspapers and magazines, Davis is also the author of a novel entitled The Sonnets (State University of New York Press, March 2001). A collection of his essays entitled Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions was published by New York University Press in August 2002. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002-2003 for his next book Obsession: The Biography of a Disease. His latest book Country of Lost Children: A Natural History of Artificial Insemination will be published by Bantam/Dell in 2008.
Last Updated ( Saturday, 03 February 2007 )
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