April 18, 2024 | Noon – 1:00 PM ET

Co-sponsored by Penn Arts & Sciences & the Penn Club of Colorado 

Disability is a near universal experience, and yet it remains on the margins of most discussions concerning identity, politics, and popular culture. Using the latest works in historical scholarship, this webinar focuses on how disability has been experienced and defined in the United States. One purpose of the discussion will be to demonstrate how disability as a historical phenomenon has profoundly shaped current attitudes toward reproduction and immigration, ideals of technological progress, and notions of the natural and the normal.

Beth Linker is a historian of medicine and disability and a former physical therapist. She is the Samuel H. Preston Endowed Term Associate Professor in the Social Sciences in the Department of History and Sociology of Science. She is the author of War’s Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America and Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America (forthcoming). Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, and other publications.