Exhibit and Lecture | People with Disabilities Securing Civil Rights
Through a new traveling exhibition, discover an overlooked moment in U.S. history when people with disabilities occupied a government building to win their rights. The exhibit Patient No More: People with Disabilities Securing Civil Rights will be on display at University of Oregon Libraries’ Special Collections and University Archives from Monday, April 23rd, 2018 to Friday, June 15th, 2018. The exhibition uncovers the stories behind a turbulent April in 1977, when people with disabilities successfully launched protests across the nation to get Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 signed into law.
Please join us at the opening of this forthcoming exhibit on Monday, April 23rd, 2018, 4:00-5:00 pm in the Knight Library Browsing Room for a public lecture by guest speaker Professor Catherine Kudlick. Following the lecture there will be a reception and public viewing of the exhibition in the Paulson Reading Room. All events are free and open to the public.
Catherine Kudlick is professor of history and director of the Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability at San Francisco State University. Kudlick earned her BA from University of California, Santa Cruz in 1980 and her PhD from University of California, Berkeley, in 1988. She was professor of history at University of California Davis from 1989 to 2012 and was named director of the Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability in 2012.
From 2005 to 2009 she served as president of the Disability History Association and on the board of directors for both the Society for Disability Studies and the Western Society for French History. While on the board of SDS, she oversaw the creation of Guidelines for Disability Studies. In 2010, along with Professor Susan Schweik (UC Berkeley), she headed an initiative that brought together scholars to explore the future of disability studies.
She has spearheaded a number of initiatives related to electronic accessibility in higher education and her scholarship explores history of medicine, history of epidemics, and the relationship between disability history and history of medicine primarily in eighteenth and nineteen-century France. The field has been shaped by her essays: “Disability History: Why We Need Another Other” in the American Historical Review and “Comment: At the Borderland of Medical and Disability History” in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine.
She has also published personal thought-pieces “Black Bike, White Cane: Timely Confessions of a Special Self“, and “The Blind Man’s Harley: White Canes and Gender Identity in Modern America“, that was a 2005 Notable Essay in Best American Essays. Her books include Reflections: the Life and Writings of a Young Blind Woman in Post Revolutionary France with Dr. Zina Weygand and Cholera in Post-Revolutionary Paris: A Cultural History. After the death of Paul K. Longmore in 2010, she oversaw completion and publication of his magnum opus, “Telethons: Spectacle, Disability, and the Business of Charity“.
In celebration of the 25 anniversary of the passage of ADA in 2016, Professor Kudlick led the exhibit “Patient No More: People with Disabilities Securing Civil Rights,” which focuses on the grassroots protest movement regarding the implementation of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, Section 504.
