Dr. Audra Jennings
Director
Office: Honors Annex 1
Phone: 270.745.5043
Email: audra.jennings@wku.edu
Courses
Honors 300: Monsters, Maggots, and Morphine: Medicine and Society in Modern America (Fall 2010)
Research
Audra Jennings is the author of “‘An Emblem of Distinction’: The Politics of Disability Entitlement, 1940-1950,” in The Politics of Veterans Policy: Federal Policies and Veterans in the Modern US, ed. Stephen R. Ortiz (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, forthcoming) and “‘The Greatest Numbers . . . Will Be Wage Earners’: Organized Labor and Disability Activism, 1945-1953,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas (November 2007). Her current book project, Out of the Horrors of War: The Politics of Disability in Post-World War II America, analyzes disability activism and the expansion of federal disability policy in the wake of World War II. Based on extensive archival research, this work elucidates how ability and disability shaped the ways in which Americans defined and codified the rights of citizenship; notions of fitness, dependency, and entitlement; and the responsibilities of the state to its citizens. This study also examines the discrimination, grinding poverty, and frustration with medical authority that led to the development of a vibrant social movement.
Bio
Audra Jennings received her Ph.D. from The Ohio State University (OSU) in 2008. She began her career at Ohio State University, Newark, where she taught American history and historical methods. In 2009, she joined the WKU Honors College.
At WKU, Dr. Jennings works with students to help them develop strong national scholarship and graduate school applications. Additionally, she teaches Honors seminars that focus on the history of disability, medicine, and modern America.
Dr. Jennings is the recipient of the 2006 Harry S. Truman Library Institute Dissertation Year Fellowship, the William Green Memorial Fellowship from the Department of Economics at OSU, and the Presidential Fellowship from the Graduate School at OSU. She has also received research and travel grants from the Roosevelt and Truman Libraries and the Graduate School, Department of History, and the Council of Graduate Students at OSU.
