Lennard J. Davis

Lennard J. Davis, a nationally and internationally known American specialist in disability studies, is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, School of Arts and Sciences, and also Professor of Disability and Human Development in the School of Applied Health Sciences and Professor of Medical Education in the University of Illinois College of Medicine.

He is also director of Project Biocultures, a think-tank devoted to studying the intersection of culture, medicine, disability, biotechnology, and the biosphere. His current interests include disability-related issues; literary and cultural theory; genetics, race, identity; and biocultural issues.

He received degrees of B.A., M.A., and M.Phil. at Columbia University, and a PhD. in the Department of English and Comparative Literature in 1976. His dissertation director was Edward Said.

Davis is the author of works in a number of fields.

In English literature, he has written two works on the novel, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (Columbia U. Press, 1983, rpt. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996 ISBN) and Resisting Novels: Fiction and Ideology (Routledge, 1987, rpt. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001) and been co-editor of Left Politics and the Literary Profession.

His works on disability include Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (Verso, 1995), and The Disability Studies Reader (Routledge, 4th edition 2014). A collection of his essays entitled Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions was published by New York University Press in August 2002. He is also the author of The End of Normal: Identity in a Biocultural Era (U of Michigan, 2014). His latest book is a history of the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act titled Enabling Acts: The Hidden Story of How the Americans with Disabilities Act Gave the Largest US Minority Its Rights, published by Beacon Press in July 2015 on the 25th anniversary of that act.

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