This issue of Profession contains Michael Bérubé’s introduction to his Presidential Forum, Avenues of Access, which was held at the 2013 MLA convention, and the essays of the forum participants: Joshua A. Boldt, Beth Landers, Maria Maisto, and Robert Samuels. The issue also features a section on a statistical study documenting the participation of people of color in humanities doctoral programs. Curated by the MLA Committee on the Literatures of People of Color in the United S...

In North America, immigration has never been about immigration. That was true in the early twentieth century when anti-immigrant rhetoric led to draconian crackdowns on the movement of bodies, and it is true today as new measures seek to construct migrants as dangerous and undesirable. This premise forms the crux of Jay Timothy Dolmage’s new book Disabled Upon Arrival: Eugenics, Immigration, and the Construction of Race and Disability, a compelling examination of the spaces, techn...

Disability Rhetoric is the first book to view rhetorical theory and history through the lens of disability studies. Traditionally, the body has been seen as, at best, a rhetorical distraction; at worst, those whose bodies do not conform to a narrow range of norms are disqualified from speaking. Yet, Dolmage argues that communication has always been obsessed with the meaning of the body and that bodily difference is always highly rhetorical. Following from this rewriting of rhetorical histo...