Susan Schweik, professor of English and associate dean of arts and humanities

Susan Schweik is a professor of English and associate dean of arts and humanities in the College of Letters & Science. She is the author of "The Ugly Laws," a social and cultural history of an ordinance adopted by many American cities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to prohibit "diseased," "maimed" and "deformed" people from exposing themselves to public view.

A former Presidential Chair in Undergraduate Education for Disability Studies at U.C. Berkeley, Schweik has been deeply involved with the development of disability studies at UC Berkeley. She was co-coordinator of the Ed Roberts Fellowships in Disability Studies post-doctoral program at UC Berkeley. She has taught and co-taught undergraduate courses in disability and literature, the disability rights movement, disability and digital Storytelling, psychiatric disability, literature and medicine, and race, ethnicity and disability, and graduate courses in body theory and disability studies and advanced disability studies. Her other teaching and research interests include 20th century poetry, late 19th century American literature, women's studies and gender theory, urban studies, war literature and children's literature.

She is a recipient of UC Berkeley's Distinguished Teaching Award and the Chancellor's Award for Advancing Institutional Excellence.