Julie Passanante Elman is currently Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Women's & Gender Studies. Beginning in Fall 2021, she began serving as Faculty Fellow of Humanities Initiatives & Inclusive Culture for the College of Arts & Science. Elman earned her Ph.D. in American Studies from George Washington University in 2009. Prior to joining the University of Missouri, she previously served as Lecturer of Television Studies/Media Theory at University College Dublin (Republic of Ireland) and Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow of Gender and Sexuality Studies in New York University's Department of Social & Cultural Analysis, where she developed NYU’s first-ever undergraduate disability studies course. Elman’s research focuses broadly on disability studies; feminist and queer theory; science studies; and U.S. media and cultural history. Her monograph, Chronic Youth: Disability, Sexuality, and US Media Cultures of Rehabilitation (Social & Cultural Analysis Series, NYUP, 2014) shows how the representational figure of the teenager became a cultural touchstone for shifting notions of able-bodiedness, heteronormativity, and neoliberalism in the post-sexual liberation era. By analyzing how adolescence increasingly became represented as a disability, the book reveals how the teenager became a lynchpin for a US culture of perpetual rehabilitation and governmentality. Elman's research has also appeared in Feminist Formations, Feminist Media Studies, Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, New Media & Society, Somatosphere, and Television & New Media and was featured in the first-ever anthology of disability media studies scholarship, Disability Media Studies (NYUP, 2017, eds. Elizabeth Ellcessor and William Kirkpatrick, eds). She is currently working on two projects: an article about European dementia villages and her second monograph, Capacity Feminism and Its Discontents, which analyzes feminist notions of strength and resilience alongside crip of color feminisms organized around revolutionary rest. Elman’s teaching excellence was recognized with two University of Missouri campus-level awards: the University of Missouri Provost’s Outstanding Junior Faculty Teaching Award (2015) and the Maxine Christopher Shutz Award and Lecture for Distinguished Teaching (2020). In recognition of her contributions to disability advocacy and inclusion in research, teaching and service, Elman also received the University of Missouri’s Lee Henson Memorial Access Mizzou Award in 2020.