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Mid-America Chapter

The Mid-America American Studies Association (MAASA) is pleased to announce that Bess Williamson, Ph.D. candidate in American History at the University of Delaware, is the winner of the 2009 Katzman-Yetman Prize for Outstanding Graduate Student Paper for Technology and Disability Identity: The Toomey J. Gazette, 1958-1969. Ms. Williamson presented her winning paper on the Toomey J. Gazette at the 2009 Identities and Technoculture Conference, co-sponsored by MAASA and the University of Iowa¹s Center for Ethnic Studies, held April 3 ¬-4 in Iowa City.

The Cleveland-based Toomey J. Gazette began as a newsletter affiliated with a polio rehabilitation center and expanded into a community newspaper “by, for, and about” readers who suffered severe physical disabilities after surviving acute cases of polio. Ms. Williamson’s paper explores how technical information-sharing through the Gazette helped build community identity among people with disabilities in postwar America.

The awards committee was impressed with how Ms. Williamson’s paper engaged with important and intersecting issues in the fields of technology studies, medical history, and identity studies. In the process, Ms. Williamson made a convincing case for the larger historical significance of her particular case study. Ms. Williamson¹s winning paper is part of her larger dissertation project, entitled “The Right to Design: Disability and Access in the United States, 1945-1990.” This spring, Bess Williamson is a Baird Society Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution Libraries.

In the strong 2009 competition, two other entrants earned honorable mention. The awards committee recognized Alexander Bonus of Case Western Reserve University for his entry, “Johann Maelzel, the Metronome, and Mechanized Music in Nineteenth-Century America,” and Emily Laurel Smith of the University of Minnesota for her entry, “Classifying the Needy: Disability and the TV Techno-Makeover.”

By Richard Schur, Wed, April 29, 2009 - 9:16 am
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