Society for Disability Studies

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Petra Kuppers is a disability culture activist and a community artist. She teaches in performance and disability studies at the University of Michigan. She is the Artistic Director of The Olimpias Performance Research Series, and Olimpias workshops, installations, performances and exhibitions have been created and shown in Europe, the US, New Zealand and Australia. The Olimpias projects are community-based, collaborative, and deal with disability culture issues (more info at www.umich.edu/~petra). Petra's books include Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge (Routledge, 2003), The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art (Minnesota, 2007) and Community Performance: An Introduction (Routledge, 2007). She has also co-edited with Gwen Robertson The Community Performance Reader (Routledge, 2007).

Current research projects include an essay collection on disability culture poetry; a book manuscript provisionally entitled 'Touching Time: Disability/Culture, Body Histories, Performance'; the dance/poetry/video shows Tiresias, on disability and erotics (next gigs: workshop at MLA 07, performance in February at Michigan, workshop in Rotterdam, March, then at Dance under Construction, UC Berkeley, April) and Alchemy, on cyberplay (in development); polishing a collaborative poetry manuscript with Neil Marcus called 'The Metaphor of Wind in Cripple Poetics: In Pursuit of a Kiss'; her own first poetry collection called 'Disabled Lilacs'; a special co-edited issue of the Journal of Literary Disability on Deleuze, Difference and Disability; and hanging out in sunny places having cups of coffee with interesting people.