Other Writing
In Progress Work
Dr. Audra Jennings is currently working on two book projects. The first, Rethinking the Disability Rights Movement, which she is writing with historian Felicia Kornbluh, is under contract with Routledge. It extends the temporal and substantive boundaries of the movement and contextualizes it as part of a larger matrix of movements for social change. The second book project, To Find, Count, and Cure: Disabled Children and the New Deal State, examines services for disabled children, funded by the Social Security Act of 1935 and administered by the U.S. Children’s Bureau. The program served more than one out of every 300 American children by 1948, providing a wide range of medical services. In this project, Jennings demonstrates how the state’s efforts to “discover,” “enumerate,” and treat disabled children reflected a vision of the citizen as able-bodied and how disability—informed by gender, race, class, and sexuality—shaped the New Deal state more broadly, defining who belonged and who should be excluded.
Publications (Book)
Out of the Horrors of War: Disability Politics in World War II America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
Publications (Articles and Book Chapters)
“Organized Labor and Disability in the United States,” Oxford Handbook on Disability History, ed. Michael Rembis, Kim Nielsen, and Catherine Kudlick (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
“Engendering and Regendering Disability: Gender and Disability Activism in Postwar America,” in Disability Histories, ed. Susan Burch and Michael Rembis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 345-363.
“Spanish Influenza, 1918-1919,” Retrieving the American Past (Boston: Pearson Custom Publishing, 2013).
“‘An Emblem of Distinction’: The Politics of Disability Entitlement, 1940-1950,” in Veterans’ Policies, Veterans’ Politics: New Perspectives on Veterans in the Modern United States, ed. Stephen R. Ortiz (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012), 94-116.
“Living and Fighting Polio, 1930-1960,” Retrieving the American Past (Boston: Pearson Custom Publishing, 2012).
“Introduction: Disability and History,” Disability Studies Quarterly 28 (July 2008).
“‘The Greatest Numbers . . . Will Be Wage Earners’: Organized Labor and Disability Activism, 1945-1953,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 4 (November 2007): 55-82.