Julie Passanante Elman
Director, Center for the Humanities
Director, B.A. Program in Health Humanities
Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies
Julie Passanante Elman is an associate professor of women’s and gender studies. She is the founding director of the Center for the Humanities and the B.A. program in health humanities. Elman is the author of Chronic Youth: Disability, Sexuality, and U.S. Media Cultures of Rehabilitation (NYU Press, 2014), and her articles have appeared in a variety of peer-reviewed journals. She is currently working on a second monograph, Capacity Feminism and Its Discontents. Her teaching excellence and commitment to community-building have been recognized with several university awards including the Provost’s Outstanding Junior Faculty Teaching Award, the Maxine Christopher Shutz Award and Lecture for Distinguished Teaching, and the Lee Henson Memorial Access Mizzou Award.
Working with the College of Arts and Science and the center’s executive committee and advisory board, Professor Elman promotes and supports humanities research by emphasizing its integral role in all endeavors to understand and improve our world. A deep understanding of the humanities is required to confront the many challenges we face as a society: climate change, health access disparities, maintaining a democratic society, and the impacts of social media and AI, to name a few. With a broad and inclusive commitment to fostering intellectual community, the center foregrounds public-facing scholarship and programming that features interdisciplinary research and collaboration across the arts, humanities and sciences to demonstrate the many social benefits of humanities research.
