Audra Jennings directs the Office of Scholar Development and is an associate professor in the Honors Academy at Western Kentucky University (WKU). Her first book, Out of the Horrors of War: Disability Politics in World War II America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), analyzes the ways in which the U.S. state at mid-century defined citizenship around notions of ablebodiedness by examining the American Federation of the Physically Handicapped, a national, cross-disability social movement organization that emerged during the war.
She received her Ph.D. in modern U.S. history from The Ohio State University (OSU) in 2008. Jennings has received grants and fellowships from the Harry S. Truman Library, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, University College at WKU, the Department of History at OSU, the Department of Economics at OSU, the Graduate School at OSU, and the Council of Graduate Students at OSU. She is the recipient of the 2013 Disability History Association (DHA) Outstanding Article Award and the James Madison Prize from the Society for History in the Federal Government for her article "‘An Emblem of Distinction': The Politics of Disability Entitlement, 1940-1950," which appeared in The Politics of Veterans Policy: Federal Policies and Veterans in the Modern US, ed. Stephen R. Ortiz (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012).