The NYU Center for Disability Studies announces a new book series “Disability in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine” to be published through Johns Hopkins University Press. CDS Director Mara Mills joins Jaipreet Virdi and Wayne Tan as Series Editors.

About the Series

Disability has always been part-and-parcel of human experience. Within the past twenty years, disability history has rapidly emerged as a subdiscipline with an analytical framework for examining the lived experiences of disabled people, across time and place, alongside the structural barriers that construct how disability is experienced and understood. 

Medical historians have examined how disability is historically contingent to scientific and clinical ideas about the body and health, while rethinking disease histories in the context of disability. Historians of technology have unraveled the roles disabled people play as creators, users, and redesigners of consumer products and scientific apparatuses. Historians of science have explored disability expertise, disability epistemologies, and the distinct ways research settings forge entangled histories of disability, labor, and knowledge in the laboratory, industry, and beyond. 

Disability in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (D+HSTM) is a new book series for scholars bringing disability theory into conversation with HSTM. This includes intersections with applied forms of the social sciences—demography, economics, anthropology, archeology, linguistics, music—as well as standard branches of medical science—pharmaceutics, insurance, surgery, physiology, healthcare.

We are interested in works that look at science as practiced within institutions that house or employ disabled people, the technologies and political systems used to categorize and classify disabled bodies, as well as stories of disabled professionals and lay experts working as experimenters or producers of scientific knowledge. We especially encourage proposals on non-Western and Global South histories of disability in HSTM. 

While books in this series will engage with historical methods, we encourage scholarship that overlaps with innovative and intersectional methodologies, such as “design justice” or “crip technoscience,” and we welcome work in the subfield of disability and Science and Technology Studies (STS). 

Submission Guidelines

Books in the D+HSTM series will primarily be single-authored books, but co-authored books or edited volumes with contributed chapters that present new interventions and methodologies are also welcome. 

To foster an environment of support, the editors will work closely with author(s) through the book proposal and manuscript process. We especially aim to mentor first-time authors by providing extensive editorial feedback, suggestions for resources, and opportunities to workshop manuscript drafts. 

With a commitment to disability justice, books in this series will incorporate aspects of accessible publishing (e.g. alt text for e-books) and will be promoted widely both inside and outside of academic circles. Where possible, the editors will strive to work with authors to make their books Open Access. 

Have a book idea in mind? A manuscript that is a perfect fit? Or questions? 

Get in touch: disabilityhstm@gmail.com