Disability Studies at UCLA
Redefining Normal

Victoria Marks

Professor, Chair of Disability Studies Minor, Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, UCLA

Guggenheim fellow and Alpert Award-winning choreographer, filmmaker, scholar, and activist Victoria Marks joined the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures / Dance in 1995 and, since 2017, she has served as the Associate Dean, Academic Affairs for the School of the Arts and Architecture. Marks serves as the chair of UCLA’s Disability Studies minor. She creates dances for the stage, film, and in community settings. Her choreography has long considered the politics of citizenship, as well as the representation of both virtuosity and disability. These themes are part of her ongoing commitment to locating dance-making within the sphere of political meaning.
A sunlit, outdoor headshot of a smiling white woman with short greying hair in front of green foliage.

Salih Can Açiksöz

Associate Professor of Anthropology, UCLA

Salih Can Açiksöz is an anthropologist whose research focuses on the intersections of disability, gender, and political violence, particularly in the Middle East. His first book, Sacrificial Limbs, examines the post-war lives and political activism of the disabled veterans of Turkey’s Kurdish conflict. His new book project, tentatively entitled Humanitarian Borderlands, focuses on the humanitarian prosthetics industry and emergency field medicine along and across the Turkish-Kurdish-Syrian border. He also has a perennial interest in reproductive politics and the impact of genetic testing on cultural understandings of disability and parenthood.

Juliann Anesi

Assistant Professor of Gender Studies, UCLA

Juliann Anesi is an Assistant Professor of Gender Studies whose research interests and teachings include inclusive education, indigeneity and disability, educational policies, queer and gender theory, and Pacific studies. As a community educator and activist, she has also worked with non-profit organizations and schools in American Samoa, California, Hawai’i, New York and Samoa. Juliann is currently working on a book manuscript, Trying Times: Disability, Education, and Activism in Samoa.

Bruce Baker

Distinguished Research Professor of Psychology, UCLA

Bruce’s primary research seeks a better understanding of family functioning for children and their families. He is especially interested in three populations: (1) Families of children and adolescents with developmental disorders (e.g., intellectual disability, autism spectrum disorder); (2) Behavior and mental health disorders in youth and young adults with developmental disorders; and (3) Protective factors for family functioning. His primary recent study, the NICHD-supported Collaborative Family Study, is a 20-year longitudinal study of families of children with developmental disabilities or typical intellectual development, from age 3-23. It focuses on child emotion regulation, behavior problems, social competence, and family processes.

Lauren Clark

Shapiro Family Endowed Chair in Developmental Disabilities Studies, UCLA

Linda Demer

Professor, Departments of Medicine, Physiology and Bioengineering

Helen Deutsch

Professor of English, UCLA

Helen Deutsch teaches and researches at the crossroads of eighteenth-century studies and disability studies, with particular emphases on questions of authorship, originality, and embodiment across a variety of genres. Her ongoing research questions include the relation of eighteenth-century authors to classical models (in shaping literary style, authorial careers, and gendered identities), the multifaceted connection between physical embodiment and literary form, the interplay between visual and printed cults of authorship, and the phenomenon of author-love more broadly considered, and the formative relationship between bodily difference and modern individuality. She is currently working on a book on Jonathan Swift and Edward Said that claims both writers for disability studies, and is planning a conference at the W.A. Clark Memorial Library on “Archive and Theory: The Future of Anglo-American Early Modern Disability Studies,” which aims to foster two overlapping and mutually illuminating conversations about disability in the era before “normal” was fully defined: one about the role that theory plays in how we represent and interpret archival sources, and another about how the archive invites us to critique the historical assumptions and (at times) limitations of theoretical inquiry.

Raymond Knapp

Distinguished Professor of Musicology and Humanities, Chair of the Department of Musicology, and Director of the UCLA Center for Musical Humanities

Lauren Lee McCarthy

Associate Professor of Design Media Arts, Interim Associate Dean for EDI, UCLA