Recommended by Susan Schweik, Professor of English.
"Anne Finger’s book of masterful short stories Call Me Ahab won the Prairie Schooner prize for fiction. She is able to do in this edgy, provocative, revisionary collection what I didn’t know how to pull off: render disability history as a surprise, without cliché."
Recommended by Susan Schweik, Professor of English and author of The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public.
"Sherry is one of the most subtle and at the same time one of the most pointed of disability theorists and activists. This is an essential book, by an intellectual and political leader with international perspective."
"Wilder, born in 1859, was a famous vaudeville performer often described as a 'hunchback dwarf.' He resisted tokenization by developing and claiming cross-disability (as well as cross-class) alliances with marginalized others. His work speaks not only to disability studies but to the conjunction of performance studies and critical prison studies."
Recommended by Susan Schweik, Professor of English and author of The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public.
"I had to cut a chapter on disabled Black Panther Brad Lomax’s crucial and almost forgotten activism. Nelson’s important work is fundamental for people interested in critical race studies, disability studies, the history and theory of social movements, and the confluence between those things."
Recommended by Susan Schweik, Professor of English and author of The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public.
"My book can seem to suggest a progress narrative in which a unified U.S. disability movement remembers the unsightly beggar ordinances in order to achieve passage of the law to end all ugly law, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. Bagenstos’s sharp, skeptical analysis complicates that story, with a critical eye both on the law and on disability activism, in the name of new concepts of disability justice."
"One of my subjects in the book is the way in which the emerging disability civil rights movement and its exuberant corollary disability arts culture cited the “ugly law,” in some ways misleadingly, but for compelling reasons. Lewis’s 'Other Voices theater group was at the epicenter of this project. Her co-authored play Ph*reaks in this volume is one example of how
disability culture used the law to make disability history."
"Appearance discrimination in the United States is alive and –well—still ugly. I’m pleased and honored when I hear that people are teaching The Ugly Laws alongside legal scholar Rhode’s The Beauty Bias, which makes a strong, reasoned and eminently practical case for establishing legal remedies for discrimination on the basis of appearance."
Recommended by Susan Schweik, Professor of English and author of The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public.
"The Ugly Laws started as a book about disability and turned out to be as much a book about the criminalization of poverty. The continuities between the story I told and the story Beckett and Herbert tell about new tactics of police power in urban 'public' space today are striking and chilling."
Recommended by Susan Schweik, Professor of English and author of The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public.
"In 1988 historian and professor Paul Longmore burned his own academic book on the steps of the federal building in LA. Find out why in this model work of rigorous scholarship combined with galvinizing activism by this great man, a founder of the discipline of disability studies, who died last year. His influence on my Ugly Laws was direct and incalculable."
Recommended by Susan Schweik, Professor of English and author of The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public.
