Bio from Dr. Schalk's website, available here.

Dr. Sami Schalk (she/her) is an Associate Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison. She earned her BA in English (Creative Writing) and Women’s Studies from Miami University, her MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from University of Notre Dame, and her PhD in Gender Studies from Indiana University.

Dr. Schalk also writes for mainstream outlets, serves as a board member for Freedom Inc., is a member of Community Pride Coalition of Madison, and once twerked with Lizzo. She identifies as a fat, black, queer, femme, cisgender, middle-class, polyamorous woman with chronic pain. She is also body-neutral, sex-positive, a pleasure activist, and a feminist. 

Find out more about and purchase her first book, Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction, here.

Bio from UW Disability Studies website, available here.

Jill H. Casid is Professor of Visual Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where she has a cross appointment in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies. A cluster hire in Visual Culture, she currently leads the research cluster in Visual Culture and founded and served as the first director of the Center for Visual Cultures. A historian, theorist, and practicing artist, her contributions to the transdisciplinary field of visual studies include monographs, articles, an edited collection titled Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn (Yale, 2014) co-edited with Aruna D’Souza.

She is currently completing the two-book project Form at the Edges of Life. She serves on the governing board of the International Association of Visual Culture and on the editorial board of the Journal of Visual Culture. 

She has been the recipient of numerous awards for her research and teaching, including the Chancellor’s Inclusive Excellence in Teaching Award (2015), the Vilas Research Investigator Award (2014), the H. I. Romnes Faculty Fellowship (2011), and the Hamel Faculty Fellowship (2009). In 2018–19, she is on research leave and in residence as the Clark-Oakley Fellow at the Clark Art Institute and the Oakley Humanities Center at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. 

You can view Jill's personal website here!

Bio from Amy's website, available here.

Amy Gaeta is a Ph.D. candidate in the Literary Studies and Visual Cultures (doctoral minor) programs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She takes a feminist disability approach to contemporary applications of science and technology, mainly human-robot interactions (HRI) and digital surveillance.  Amy’s dissertation, “Drone Life: A Feminist Crip Analysis of the Human” asks how the category of the human changes amid the spread of drone technology in which passivity and interdependency are valued and accepted, a contradiction to the able-bodied individual liberal subject.​

In addition to research, Amy is a practicing poet, professional editor, disability rights activist, and editor of the Unseen Zine from the Invisible Disability Project. She has published on a wide range of topics, including disability treatment processes, the ethics of algorithms, emotional labor, and higher education,  the politics of international sport,  and more. You can find her regularly on Twitter talking about all this.

Bio from UW Department of Communication Arts website, available here.

My research interests include the rhetoric of health and medicine, science and technology studies, disability studies, bioethics, and environmental communication. My research focuses on the circulation of scientific and medical information in the public sphere, with an emphasis on the social and political dimensions of nonexpert engagement with science, medicine, and technology. Much of my work has explored the meaning of neuroscience, psychiatry, and mental disability in scientific and cultural contexts. These interests are best illustrated by my book American Lobotomy, which explores how representations of psychosurgery shaped the rise, fall, and return of lobotomy in US medicine, and the co-edited collection The Neuroscientific Turn, a collection of essays from humanists and scientists reflecting on the growth of the neuro-disciplines. More recently, my research focus has shifted from the brain to the ethics and politics of life. I am currently working on a book about biocentric environmental ethics and politics, and recently co-edited a collection on the theory and practice of biocitizenship.

In addition to my position in Communication Arts, I am affiliated faculty in Life Sciences Communication, Gender and Women’s Studies, and the Holtz Center for Science & Technology Studies, serve on the steering committees of the Health and Humanities certificate and I am the director of UW’s Disability Studies Initiative. I am also one of the inaugural Mellon-Morgridge Professors in the Constellations program, a transdisciplinary initiative for undergraduates at UW-Madison.

Carlyn Mueller (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Special Education in the Department of Rehabilitation Psychology & Special Education at UW-Madison. Her research focuses on disability identity development in school contexts; including development of disability community in special education, disability representation in curriculum, and youth understandings of disability. This work is grounded in her personal experience with physical and learning disabilities, and as a student in special education. Her dissertation work on the lifespan development of disability identity received an Outstanding Dissertation Award from the American Educational Research Association’s Special & Inclusive Education Research SIG. She is currently working on a project exploring youth disability history legislation and its impact on K-12 teaching.

Bio from UW Disability Studies website, available here.

Elizabeth B. Bearden is a Professor of English at UW–Madison. She earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at New York University and her A.B. in Comparative Literature at Princeton.

Bearden’s first book, The Emblematics of the Self: Ekphrasis and Identity in Renaissance Imitations of Greek Romance, was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2012 (ebook version 2013). Her forthcoming book, Monstrous Kinds: Body, Space, and Narrative in Renaissance Representations of Disability, won the Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in the Humanities and is forthcoming from the Corporealities series of University of Michigan Press in 2019.

Bearden has published articles in PMLA (2006, 2017), JEMCS, Ancient Narrative Supplementum, Arizona Journal for Hispanic Cultural Studies, and E-Humanista Cervantes. She served on the Executive Committee for the MLA Forum on Disability Studies from 2012–16. Her current book project is tentatively titled “Crip Authority: Disability and the Art of Consolation in the Global Renaissance.”

Dr. Hailey Love (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Rehabilitation Psychology and Special Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She earned her PhD in Special Education, with a focus on early childhood, from the University of Kansas in 2018. Prior to her graduate studies, Dr. Love taught and supported programming in inclusive preschool and early elementary classrooms in Boston.  

Through her scholarship, Dr. Love aims to advance equitable, inclusive education for young children with disabilities, particularly multiply-marginalized dis/abled children. Her research examines the intersections of racism and ableism and ways to disrupt exclusionary processes and practices that marginalize dis/abled children of Color. Her current projects include work on inclusive and culturally-sustaining practices, teacher preparation and professional development, and family-professional partnerships with families of Color. Dr. Love also examines applications of mixed methods inquiry within early childhood and disability research. 

Morgan Cacic (she/her) is a disabled academic, children’s book author, #OwnVoices writer of fiction and nonfiction, and social justice activist. She has taught German & English literacy and literature in a variety of capacities in the greater-Madison (WI) area over the past ten years and has an MS in Education: Teaching & Learning, with current WI teaching licenses in Alternative Education and German Language. Since joining the PhD program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2018, she has completed an MA in German Literature and welcomed two children. She is currently working to finish her Ph.D., with research interests in the intersections of disability justice, German Literature, and cultivating communities of care in the higher education classroom. She is actively involved in disability and inclusion initiatives on the UW-Madison campus and in its surrounding communities. 

More information available on the German, Nordic and Slavic Department website.

Select publications: Just Hold On: A love letter to a lost soul (2024), The Kindness Crew: Yabbity Crabbity is Non-binary! (2024), The Kindness Crew: Iggidy and Higgidy at School (2022).