Featured Speakers
Joshua Miele
Dr. Joshua A. Miele is a prominent blind scientist, designer, and thought leader in accessible technology and disability. He is a recipient of the 2021 MacArthur Fellowship, an Amazon Design Scholar, and Distinguished Fellow at UC Berkeley’s OBI. He is known for creating inclusive technologies that address critical needs and challenge societal assumptions, and for speaking with frank humor about the lived disability experience. Dr. Miele helps guide the non-visual customer experience for Amazon devices, and advises widely on accessible design, research methods, and disability inclusion. He is the father of two adult children and lives with his wife in Berkeley, California.
Georgina Kleege
Georgina Kleege joined the English department at the University of California, Berkeley in 2003 where in addition to teaching creative writing classes she teaches courses on representations of disability in literature, and disability memoir. Her collection of personal essays, Sight Unseen (1999) is a classic in the field of disability studies. Essays include an autobiographical account of Kleege’s own blindness, and cultural critique of depictions of blindness in literature, film, and language. Many of these essays are required reading for students in disability studies, as well as visual culture, education, public health, psychology, philosophy and ophthalmology. Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller (2006) transcends the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction to re-imagine the life and legacy of this celebrated disability icon. Kleege’s latest book, More Than Meets the Eye: What Blindness Brings to Art (2018) is concerned with blindness and visual art: how blindness is represented in art, how blindness affects the lives of visual artists, how museums can make visual art accessible to people who are blind and visually impaired. She has lectured and served as consultant to art institutions around the world including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Tate Modern in London. Kleege received the Distinguished Teaching Award from the Division of Arts and Humanities in 2013, and from the UCB campus as a whole in 2016.
Moderators
Julia Miele Rodas is Professor of English at Bronx Community College of the City University of New York. She earned her M.Phil. and Ph.D. in English from the CUNY Graduate Center and holds a B.A. in Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College. A disability studies scholar and Victorianist, Julia is co-editor of a collection on disability in Jane Eyre, The Madwoman and the Blindman (The Ohio State University Press, 2012) and co-editor of the Literary Disability Studies book series for Palgrave Macmillan. Her writing has appeared in numerous books and journals, including Victorian Literature & Culture, Dickens Studies Annual, the Victorian Review, the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, Disability Studies Quarterly, and other venues. Her monograph, Autistic Disturbances: Theorizing Autism Poetics from the DSM to Robinson Crusoe (University of Michigan Press, 2018)—theorizes the role of autistic rhetoric and aesthetic in literature. Julia teaches writing, literature, and disability studies at Bronx Community College as well as guest courses at Lehman College, CUNY’s School for Professional Studies, and the CUNY Graduate Center. She is also co-Chair of the Columbia University Seminar in Disability, Culture & Society and serves as lead consultant on the Metropolitan Museum’s Crip the Met initiative.
Andrew Marcum, Ph.D., is the Academic Director and Distinguished Lecturer for Disability Studies at the CUNY School of Professional Studies and editor of the Journal of Teaching Disability Studies. From 2016-2022, he served as Adjunct Assistant Professor of Disability Studies at SPS and Program Coordinator for the Center for Self-Advocacy in Buffalo, NY. His education includes a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of New Mexico and an M.A. in American Studies from the University of Alabama. Dr. Marcum is a former dissertation research fellow at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. and a former Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Inclusive Design and Environmental Access at the University at Buffalo. He has received numerous academic and service awards and has been recognized by the New York State Senate and the Erie County, NY Office for People with Disabilities for his advocacy work. His scholarly publications include “Rethinking the American ‘Dream’ Home: The Disability Rights Movement and the Cultural Politics of Accessible Housing in the United States,” in Disabling Domesticity. Edited by Michael A. Rembis. New York: Palgrave/McMillan, December 2016, “‘Free Our People’: A Disability Studies Perspective on Wellbeing,” in Wellbeing as a Multi-Dimensional Concept: Understanding Connections between Culture, Community, and Health. Edited by Janet Page-Reeves. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019.
Panelists
Macael Bowles is an educator at Brooklyn College and current student in the M.A. Program in Biography & Memoir at the Graduate Center. Their research focuses on how disrupted memory and violence can shape individual and collective identities—emphasizing healing, resilience, and social responsibility. Compelled by the belief that inspiring hope is life-saving work, Macael approaches life-writing as an act of love—worthy in its inherent beauty as much as its transformative power. Macael seeks to spark critical dialogue about nurturing both personal and communal well-being through lives beautifully told. For queer people, disabled people, survivors, people on the margins—those who history would rather forget—crafting a personal version of the past is an essential act of resistance against erasure.
JD Davids (he/him) is a chronically ill and disabled writer and strategist with decades of work in world-changing social movements, policy advocacy and journalism. As an “illder” – a term he coined to represent those mentoring each other in confronting chronic illnesses and an ableist society alike – JD shares movement history, health information and unique approaches to living with illness. In this time of mass disabling pandemics, he offers stories and strategies through The Cranky Queer Guide to Chronic Illness, braiding experiences as an HIV and disability justice activist, research advocate, sexual liberationist and queer transgender parent.
Atara Ellenberg is a student in the M.A. Program in Biography & Memoir at the Graduate Center. Diagnosed with autism in her late twenties, she is now keen on researching and raising awareness about the strengths and virtues of autistic learners. She hopes to utilize both clinical and creative approaches to help society integrate neurodiversity inclusion and understanding into early education, academia, and beyond.
Sonia N. Gonzalez is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in English Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC. She’s a contributing co-editor for the collaborative essay, “Disability in the Bronx,” in Placing Disability: Personal Essays of Embodied Geography. As a freelance writer and editor, her work has appeared in various parenting and lifestyle publications, Latinx Pop Magazine, and Big City Lit.
Morgan Hope Goode is an MA candidate in M.A. Program in Biography & Memoir at the Graduate Center. Her work spans community organizing, nonprofit fundraising, and interdisciplinary historical research. Drawing on personal experiences with disability and loss, she writes memoirs that interrogate identity and representation, with a touch of humor. Her scholarship focuses on American political economy, social movements, and racial capitalism. She is passionate about finding new ways to engage with and communicate the complexities and ambiguities of lived experience and American history. She aims to make work that is accessible and resonates beyond the academy’s walls.
Alyssa Kitt Hanley is a creative powerhouse of burlesque and a critical thinker of striptease culture. Beginning her career in Australia in 2007, she has been at the forefront of shaping the Neo-burlesque revival as an award-winning performer (Burlesque Hall of Fame competitor 2017, 2022), teacher, journalist, dramaturg, producer (Mx Burlesque Australia) and Director of the Australian Burlesque Museum. Currently undertaking her PhD in theatre and performance at CUNY Graduate Center, Alyssa’s research focuses on erotic performance, disability and dance. She is proud “Disa-burly-teaser,” cancer survivor, and beauty activist championing facial difference. She lectures in theatre history at Brooklyn College.
Weldon Lam is a doctoral student in Social Welfare at CUNY’s Graduate Center and a licensed social worker with a CASAC-T credential in substance use. His interests include organizational management, innovation studies, social welfare history, social science theory development and their applications. Weldon holds a BA in Philosophy from Columbia University and an MSW from CUNY York College. Weldon is a 2024-2025 fellow of the Council on Social Work Education Minority Fellowship Program and hosts the social welfare podcast “Positive Conversations” (www.positiveconvos.com).
Lindsay Muscato is a nonfiction writer and editor based in Brooklyn, New York, where she is a student in the M.A. Program in Biography & Memoir at the Graduate Center. There, she is researching people and power struggles related to media and technology in the 20th century.Before moving to New York in 2017, she regularly produced literary events in Chicago,helping writers bring their work to life on stage.
Lisa Napoli is currently a student in the M.A. Program in Biography & Memoir at the Graduate Center and a graduate of Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass. She is the author of three biographies and a memoir.
Mathew Rodriguez is an award-winning queer Latinx Brooklyn based writer. As a journalist, he has written for Slate, The Village Voice, The Nation, as well as several outlets dedicated to HIV, including The Body and POZ. He has also served as a senior editor at Them and The Atlantic. His essays have been featured in the anthologies A Great Gay Book and Modern Loss. He has a memoir, Tough Guy, forthcoming from Abrams and a graphic novel forthcoming from Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.
Keith Rosenthal is a PhD student in History at the CUNY Graduate Center. He holds a master’s degree in Disability Studies from the CUNY School of Professional Studies. He is the editor of Capitalism and Disability: Selected Writings by Marta Russell (Haymarket Books, 2019). He has written for Disability Studies Quarterly, Jacobin, Monthly Review, Spectre Journal, and New Politics
