Kim E. Nielsen
Kim E. Nielsen is an American historian and author who specializes in disability studies. Nielsen is a professor of history, disability studies, and women's studies at the University of Toledo. Education. Nielsen earned a BA from Macalester College in 1988, a MA from the University of Iowa in 1991, and a PhD from the University of Iowa in 1996. Career. She was the founding president of the Disability History Association, and her book "A Disability History of the United States" (2012) was described as "the first broad survey of its topic and the first work to  lay out a complete periodization of American disability history". For fourteen years, she was a professor of Democracy and Justice Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay. Nielsen has written biographies of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan Macy, and participated as an on-screen expert in the "American Masters" episode, "Becoming Helen Keller" (2021). Filmmaker John Gianvito called "The Radical Lives of Helen Keller" "the best of the biographies" in a 2020 interview. A 2021 essay in the New York Times calls "The Radical Lives of Helen Keller" "a revelation". In "Disability History, Power, and Rethinking the Idea of  'The Other'" (2005), historian Catherine Kudlick notes that "Unlike earlier biographers, Nielsen places Keller's life in the context of major trends in American history... to understand her and her disability as rich and complex rather than as a feel-good caricature of one inspirational person." Awards and honors. Neilsen has received honors from the Organization of American Historians (OAH) and the Southern Association of Women Historians. She was a Fulbright Scholar in Iceland, and in 2005 held an OAH Lectureship in Japan.