Biography
Presenting Disability Programs, Minors and Departments: A National Glance
Sarah Rose is an associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Arlington, where she founded and directs the Minor in Disability Studies (founded in 2013). She also co-founded and serves as faculty advisor for UTA Libraries’ Texas Disability History Collection (https://library.uta.edu/txdisabilityhistory/), also founded in 2013, for which she and Trevor Engel co-curated the Building a Barrier-Free Campus: The History of Accessibility at the University of Texas at Arlington traveling and digitized exhibit: https://library.uta.edu/barrier-freecampus/. Her book, No Right to Be Idle: The Invention of Disability, 1840s-1930s (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) and was awarded the 2018 Philip Taft Prize in Labor and Working Class History and the 2018 Disability History Association Outstanding Book Award, among other awards. With Jaipreet Virdi and Mara Mills, she recently co-edited a volume of Osiris on Disability and the History of Science (2024) and published an article on workmen’s compensation, safety engineering, and family as disability history in the volume. Rose is now working on an oral history memoir/autobiography of Bob Kafka and Stephanie Thomas with her colleague Gerald Saxon and also a sole-authored book on “‘Why Won’t They Get Hearing Aids’: Insurance, Age, Disability, and Medical Technology.”