The Disability Studies Lecture Series provides access to world-class scholarship and expertise in the vital multi-disciplinary field of critical disability studies. Our aim is to increase disability literacy in our communities and to enrich our own scholarship, creativity, and activism by engaging with new ideas in disability theory, history, culture, and the arts.
Tiffany F. Jones is a Professor of African History and is currently finishing up on a book entitled Embodying the Past: Contextualizing Bodies, Death, and Memorialization in South Africa from the 19th Century to 2015 (Lexington Press, forthcoming). She is also the author of Psychiatry, Mental Institutions and the Mad in Apartheid South Africa, published by Routledge in 2012 and co-editor of Africa and the Wider World, published by Pearson in 2010. Her work has also appeared in many international journals. She was the book review editor of Notes and Records: an International Journal of African and African Diaspora Studies and the copy editor for the Journal of Retracing Africa.
Jessica Lewis Luck is Professor and Chair of the English Department at California State University San Bernardino where she teaches courses in poetry and poetics, American literature, literary theory, and disability studies. She has a PhD in English from Indiana University, which she received in 2006. Her book Poetics of Cognition: Thinking through Experimental Poems (University of Iowa Press, 2023) investigates the material effects of experimental poetics using new evidence emerging from cognitive science. An award-winning teacher at CSUSB, she has also published essays about pedagogy as well as disability poetry and poetics, with articles on Larry Eigner, Deaf poetry, the poetics of medical imaging, and an introduction to disability poetry in the new Bloomsbury Handbook of Contemporary Poetry (2023).
Dr. Jess Block Nerren is a researcher of Disability Inclusion, Public Relations and Teacher Education as a full time faculty member at CSUSB in the Department of Communication Studies. Currently, Dr. Nerren is on special assignment as the Faculty Inclusion Fellow for Disability, Difference and Accommodation at CSUSB. Previously, she served as Interim Faculty Director of the Services to Students with Disabilities office, where she oversaw accommodations for over 2,000 students attending the university. She is the editor and contributing author of the scholarly book Rethinking Perception and Centering the Voices of Unique Individuals: Reframing Autism Inclusion in Praxis. As an alum. of CSUSB, Jess completed her Educational Doctorate in 2021.
Jeremy Murray teaches and writes about modern China, and has published work on Hainan island, Asian cultural traditions, and pop culture. He is currently the faculty coordinator of the CSUSB Master of Arts in History Program. With Tiffany Jones, he is faculty advisor for the award-winning student-run history journal, History in the Making. He coordinates the CSUSB Modern China Lecture Series and helps coordinate the CSUSB Conversations on Race and Policing. His books include China's Lonely Revolution: The Local Communist Movement of Hainan Island, 1926-1956 (SUNY, 2017), Asian Cultural Traditions (with Carolyn Brown Heinz, Waveland, 2019), and China Tripping: Encountering the Everyday in the People's Republic (with Perry Link and Paul Pickowicz, Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).