Disability Studies
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Meet the Editorial Board
Letter from the Editor in Chief
About the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Disability Studies
With today’s overabundance of information, and misinformation, students and researchers alike can be overwhelmed when trying to identify what’s trustworthy, what’s up-to-date, and what’s accurate.
Oxford University Press will launch the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Disability Studies to meet this challenge. We will publish long-form, peer-reviewed overview articles covering history, life writing, the philosophy and theory of disability, drama, approaches to disability from the Global South, education, sport, and fiction, among many other topics.
Find information about the scholars who will shape the content of this exciting new resource.
The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Disability Studies is part of the larger online Oxford Research Encyclopedias (OREs). OREs are dynamic digital encyclopedias which are continuously updated by a community of leading scholars and researchers.
Join the Oxford Research Encyclopedias Community
Oxford would like to invite you to join an engaged community of authors, scholars, librarians, and students to build a better reference platform of enduring academic values. Whether you wish to contribute, provide insights and recommendations, or simply ask a question, email us at disabilitystudies.ore@oup.com to connect with the editorial team. We look forward to hearing from you.
Editorial Board
Editor in Chief
DAVID BOLT
David Bolt is Professor of Disability Studies and Interdisciplinarity, Programme Leader on the Disability Studies MA, and Director of the Centre for Culture and Disability Studies at Liverpool Hope University, where he teaches multiple aspects of disability studies to students ranging from 1st-year undergraduates to doctoral candidates. He is Editor in Chief of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies (Liverpool University Press/Project MUSE/Scopus), a quarterly publication founded in 2006. He is Book Series Editor of Autocritical Disability Studies (Routledge) and, with Elizabeth J. Donaldson and Julia Miele Rodas, of Literary Disability Studies (Palgrave Macmillan/Springer) and General Editor, with Robert McRuer, of the six-volume project A Cultural History of Disability (Bloomsbury). He has authored The Metanarrative of Blindness: A Re-reading of Twentieth-Century Anglophone Writing (University of Michigan Press, 2014), Cultural Disability Studies in Education: Interdisciplinary Navigations of the Normative Divide (Routledge, 2019), and Disability Duplicity and the Formative Cultural Identity Politics of Generation X (Routledge, 2024). He is Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and has been Honorary Research Fellow of the Centre for Disability Research, Lancaster University. He is editor of Changing social attitudes toward disability: Perspectives from historical, cultural, and educational studies (Routledge, 2014, translated into Korean, 2018), Metanarratives of Disability: Culture, Assumed Authority and the Normative Social Order (Routledge, 2021), and Finding Blindness: International Constructions and Deconstructions (Routledge, 2023), and has collaborated on the editing of other projects, including Disability, Avoidance and the Academy: Challenging Resistance (Routledge, 2016), The Madwoman and the Blindman: Jane Eyre, Discourse, Disability (Ohio State University Press, 2012), and a special issue of the Review of Disability Studies (2010).
Editorial Board
MICHAEL REMBIS
Michael Rembis is the Director of the Center for Disability Studies and an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University at Buffalo (SUNY). Rembis has authored or edited many books, articles, and book chapters, including: Defining Deviance: Sex, Science, and Delinquent Girls, 1890-1960 (University of Illinois Press, 2011/2013); Disability Histories co-edited with Susan Burch (University of Illinois Press, 2014); The Oxford Handbook of Disability History co-edited with Catherine Kudlick and Kim Nielsen (Oxford University Press, 2018); Disabling Domesticity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); and Disability: A Reference Handbook (ABC-CLIO, 2019). In 2012, Rembis and co-editor Kim Nielsen launched the Disability Histories book series with University of Illinois Press. His research interests include the history of institutionalization, mad people's history, and the history of eugenics. He is currently working on a book entitled, Writing Mad Lives - in the Age of the Asylum. Rembis is the lead scholar on the New York City Department of Education Hidden Voices Project, Perspectives of Americans with Disabilities.
ESSAKA JOSHUA
Essaka Joshua, PhD, FSA, is Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, USA. She specializes in the literary and cultural perceptions of disability of the Romantic and Victorian periods. Professor Joshua is the author of three monographs: Physical Disability in British Romantic Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2020), The Romantics and the May Day Tradition (Ashgate, 2007), and Pygmalion and Galatea: The History of a Narrative in English Literature (Ashgate, 2001). She is currently working on a monograph on disability in Romantic Theatre and is the general editor of the four-volume series, The Oxford Handbooks of Disability and Literatures in English: 700-Present.
SUSANNAH MINTZ
Susannah B. Mintz has published extensively in the areas of disability representation, life writing, and early modern literature. Her books include the memoir Love Affair in the Garden of Milton: Poetry, Loss, and the Meaning of Unbelief (2021) and four scholarly volumes on disability and literature, most recently The Disabled Detective: Sleuthing Disability in Contemporary Crime Fiction (2019) and Hurt and Pain: Literature and the Suffering Body (2014). She is the co-editor of five collections on disability issues, including Disability in the Long Eighteenth Century (2019, with Chris Gabbard) and Disability Experiences (2019, with G. Thomas Couser), and most recently Placing Disability: Personal Stories of Embodied Geography (2024, with Gregory Fraser). Forthcoming from Reaktion is the monograph Hypochondria: Symptom or Story? Her creative nonfiction has won numerous prizes and awards and appears in the Notable list of Best American Essays and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. She is Professor of English at Skidmore College.
SHELLEY TREMAIN
Shelley L. Tremain (she/they/settler/disabled feminist killjoy) holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from York University (Canada), has taught in Canada, the U.S., and Australia, and publishes on a range of topics, including: philosophy of disability, Michel Foucault, feminist philosophy, ableism in philosophy, social metaphysics and epistemology, and biopolitics/bioethics. From April 2015, Tremain has coordinated, edited, and produced Dialogues on Disability, the groundbreaking and critically acclaimed series of interviews that she is conducting with disabled philosophers and posts to BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY on the third Wednesday of each month. Tremain is the author of Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability (University of Michigan Press, 2017), the manuscript for which was awarded the 2016 Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in the Humanities; the editor of two editions of Foucault and the Government of Disability (University of Michigan Press, 2005; 2015), the first of which has been translated into Korean; and the editor of The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024). Shelley Tremain was also the 2016 recipient of the Tanis Doe Award for Disability Study and Culture in Canada; the Ed Roberts Postdoctoral Fellow at The University of California at Berkeley and the World Institute on Disability in Oakland, CA; and a Principal Investigator for Canada’s national policy research institute to promote the human rights of disabled people.
ANN FOX
Ann M. Fox is a curator, disability studies scholar, and professor of English at Davidson College. She teaches classes on disability studies in literature and art, modern and contemporary drama, and graphic medicine. Her scholarly work has been widely published and she has curated exhibitions of disability art at the Ford Foundation Gallery and the Van Every/Smith Galleries at Davidson College.
DAVID CONNOR
David J. Connor, Ed.D, is a Professor Emeritus of Hunter College (Learning Disabilities Program) and the Graduate Center (Urban Education Program), City University of New York. He has published numerous articles, book chapters, and books. His research interests include inclusive education, disability studies, disability studies in education, critical disability studies, disability critical race theory, critical special education, and pedagogy. For more information, see hunter-cuny.academia.edu/DavidJConnor.
CHRISTOPHER BROWN
Dr Chris Brown is an expert in disability sport and the Paralympic Games. Dr Brown is the founder of the Disability Sport Info project and host of the Disability Sport Info podcast. Chris’s PhD focused on the sport participation legacies of the London 2012 Paralympic Games. Chris has published in international journals and book chapters on topics such as the Paralympic Games, Paralympic legacies, grassroots disability sport, and disability sport spectatorship. Chris has experience of media work, having done TV and radio engagements discussing the 2024 Paralympic Games. This included appearing on BBC News and France 24.
Letter from the Editor in Chief
The meaning of disability varies from person to person, time to time, and place to place. In all contexts it is the most impactful of identities. Whatever our gender, race, religion, nationality, class, or sexuality, we know that disability, with its multiple meanings, is likely to become an aspect of our lives, if not so already.
As a focus of academic study, disability has been of interest for more than a century, ranging from injury and the psyche to stigma, educational needs, and rehabilitation. Early academic interests, however, were largely limited to individualised meanings, whereby disability was located within the bodies and minds of a few people. Such understandings failed to recognise the universal relevance of disability and thus marginalised the people ostensibly central to the work.
Thanks to disability activism and its initial impact on the social sciences, a formal subject of disability studies emerged from the Anglo-American identity politics of the mid 1970s. This radical but profoundly informed subject reflected and initiated academic explorations of disability in ways that separated disablement from impairment, social barriers from medical conditions, and civil rights from social norms. Formalised via academic periodicals such as Disability & Society and Disability Studies Quarterly, and academic programmes that extended beyond the Anglo-American institutions into Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, by the end of the 20th century disability studies was increasingly appreciated for its contributions and value to the social sciences.
Primarily in the United States, the subject of disability studies began to impress upon the humanities during the 1990s. As the social sciences probed stereotypes for their influence on attitudes, the humanities critiqued the motifs, metaphors, and characterisations of cultural representation. This being so, disability was incrementally accepted as a focus alongside race, class, and gender in the taxonomy of critical approaches to cultural representations. By the start of the 21st century, therefore, disability was understood in sociocultural terms, as a complex mix of history, philosophy, embodiment, technology, barriers, assumptions, affirmations, models, theories, and depictions, as reflected in the introduction of the Corporealities, Representations, and Literary Disability Studies book series, as well as periodicals such as Review of Disability Studies, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, and Canadian Journal of Disability Studies.
As with the humanities, the field of education was enriched by disability studies. Most explicitly, Disability Studies in Education (DSE) sought deeper understandings of how disability was conceptualised and experienced in educational institutions, be they contemporary or historical. Reflected in the early periodicals and consolidated in the launch of Journal of Disability Studies in Education, better representation meant progress beyond renderings of specialness, the specific foci being the inclusion of students and staff in the classroom and curricular.
Building on this relatively recent history, the Oxford Research Encyclopedia approaches disability studies as an interdisciplinary subject that spans the fields of social science, the humanities, and education, not to mention the many academic subjects therein and beyond, be it progressively or potentially. We recognise that the centrality afforded to the otherwise marginalised experience predicates a rich source of knowledge. We also recognise that, as the most impactful identity, disability necessarily coexists with other identities, which in itself adds to the richness of disability studies. Ranging from gender to sexuality and race, work on intersectionality is increasingly important to the field. Indeed, as disability studies finds, explores, challenges, and celebrates representations on personal, social, international, and intercontinental scales, intersectionality with other identities defines the key directions of new and future work. In the Oxford Research Encyclopedia, then, disability studies is a global subject of enquiry, led not only by the experiences but also by the ideas, understandings, and complex identities of disabled people.
David Bolt
Editor-in-Chief
Professor of Disability Studies and Interdisciplinarity at Liverpool Hope University
