Held on November 20, 2013
A one-hour lecture on disability on the Holocaust, followed by a viewing of the documentary Liebe Perla, which introduces the history of brutality toward and murder of people with disabilities in Nazi Germany. After the screening, a Q&A was held with Dr. Linton and Mr. von Tippelskirch and which was moderated by Dr. Amy Traver, Professor of Sociology at Queensborough Community College, CUNY. The speakers discussed the implications of the film for understanding both the Holocaust and the present moment. Liebe Perla is an astounding and intimate documentary film that traces the friendship of two disabled women as they resurrect a lost history - the history of violence and murder of disabled people in Nazi Germany. Simi Linton has toured with Liebe Perla to over 50 places in the U.S. and Canada and the film received several significant prizes at international film festivals.
Simi Linton has been at the forefront of disability studies since its early days. While on the faculty at Hunter College she wrote the groundbreaking study of this field, Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity (New York University Press, 1998). She was awarded a Mary E. Switzer Distinguished Fellowship by the US Department of Education National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research, 1995-1996 and has been the Co-Director of the University Seminar in Disability Studies at Columbia University since 2003. She was a CUNY faculty member from 1985-1998. Dr. Linton and Mr. von Tippelskirch are the Directors and Producers of the forthcoming documentary film, Invitation to Dance.
Christian von Tippelskirch is a U.S. filmmaker originally from Germany, where he studied Psychology and Sociology in the 70s. He was an active member of the movement against the institutionalization of people with psychiatric diagnoses that emerged in Germany in response to the treatment of disabled people before, during, and after the Holocaust. Dr. Linton and Mr. von Tippelskirch are the Directors and Producers of the forthcoming documentary film, Invitation to Dance.
Dr. Amy Traver is Professor of Sociology at Queensborough Community College, CUNY. Her research interests include student success and experiential pedagogies in community college contexts, as well as intersections of race/ethnicity and gender in American family life. Her most recent publications in these areas include articles in Teaching Sociology, Internet and Higher Education (with Volchok, Bidjerano, and Shea), Qualitative Sociology, Sociological Focus, and International Journal of Sociology of the Family. She is also the co-editor (with Perel Katz) of Service-Learning at the American Community College (Palgrave Macmillan 2014), an edited volume reviewed as a “must read” that “suggests a strategy for reconsidering the priorities and practices of higher education.” Traver is a graduate of Colgate University (B.A., 1997), Harvard University (Ed.M., 1999), and the State University of New York at Stony Brook (Ph.D., 2008).