Post-Doctoral Fellows

Shuko Tamao will be a Center for Disability Studies postdoctoral fellow for the 2020-2021 year. Shuko earned a PhD in History at the University at Buffalo in 2020. While an MA student in Public History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, she helped expand the Special Collections and University Archives’ disability-related collections by processing the Judi Chamberlin Papers and the records of the International Center for the Disabled. Her research areas are in 20th century American history, madness, medicine, and oral history with a particular focus on first-person narratives pertaining to the experience of commitment to postwar American psychiatric hospitals. She is currently working on a manuscript project titled “Resisting Anonymity through Remembrance: A Narrative Examination of Postwar State Hospital Experiences.”

Alexandra Prince will be a Center for Disability Studies postdoctoral fellow for the 2020-2021 year. Alexandra completed their PhD in History at the University at Buffalo in spring 2020. Their dissertation examined popular, theological and medical debates regarding the relationship between new American religious identities and madness over the long 19th century. They are currently working on a book manuscript on this subject. Alexandra is a research fellow at the Mary Baker Eddy Library and has held previous fellowships with Humanities New York and the UB Gender Institute. Alexandra’s research interests include the social history of madness, American religious history, religious healing, the history of psychiatry and historical reckonings between scientific and religious worldviews. Alexandra is an expert contributor to the Database of Religious History. They also produce the new podcast Sabbathways, which shares glimpses of American religious texts and perspectives. In the future, Alexandra will be pursuing teaching opportunities regarding the history of madness, American religious history and disability studies.

Catherine N. Allen completed her PhD in Comparative Literature in 2019, and will be a postdoctoral fellow at UB’s Center for Disability Studies during the 2020-2021 academic year. Her research interests include disability studies, medical humanities, and bioethics. Specifically, her research probes the conceptual compatibility of traditional medical and disability studies perspectives, as well as the ways they might be practically integrated to enhance medical education on disability. Her dissertation demonstrates that a closing of the disciplinary gap between the disparate fields of medicine and disability studies would enable a more comprehensive, inclusive, and socially-oriented approach to care and cure that would empower both health care providers and people with disabilities. In the coming year, she will also continue this research as a visiting scholar at a bioethics research institute, The Hastings Center, and in the future, will pursue opportunities to teach disability studies and health humanities in medical settings.

Natalia Pamula was a postdoctoral fellow at UB’s Center for Disability Studies during the 2018-2019 academic year. Pamula is an assistant professor in the American Studies Center at the University of Warsaw (Poland). She works at the intersection of disability studies, Polish studies, socialist studies, and gender studies. Currently, she is working on a book on representations of disability in post-1989 Polish culture. Her writing has appeared in: Aspasia: The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women's and Gender History, Canadian Slavonic Papers, and East European Politics Societies and Cultures. She is the Polish translator of Rosemarie Garland Thomson's Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. Visit her faculty page.