Michael Rembis' new book, "Writing Mad Lives in the Age of the Asylum" (2025) is published by Oxford University Press (2025). The work enables a significant new interpretation of the history of madness and asylums, as well as the people who occupied them.

To celebrate the new book, the UB CAS Department of History hosted a well-attended event, October 31, 2025. A lively discussion included commentary by Prof. Rachel da Silveira Gorman (York). Learn more about the book.

Book description: The asylum--at once a place of refuge, incarceration, and abuse--touched the lives of many Americans living between 1830 and 1950. What began as a few scattered institutions in the mid-eighteenth century grew to 579 public and private asylums by the 1940s. About one out of every 280 Americans was an inmate in an asylum at an annual cost to taxpayers of approximately $200 million.

Using the writing of former asylum inmates, as well as other sources, Writing Mad Lives in the Age of the Asylum reveals a history of madness and the asylum that has remained hidden by a focus on doctors, diagnoses, and other interventions into mad people's lives. Although those details are present in this story, its focus is the hundreds of inmates who spoke out or published pamphlets, memorials, memoirs, and articles about their experiences. They recalled physical beatings and prolonged restraint and isolation. They described what it felt like to be gawked at like animals by visitors and the hardships they faced re-entering the community. Many inmates argued that asylums were more akin to prisons than medical facilities and testified before state legislatures and the US Congress, lobbying for reforms to what became popularly known as "lunacy laws."

Michael Rembis demonstrates how their stories influenced popular, legal, and medical conceptualizations of madness and the asylum at a time when most Americans seemed to be groping toward a more modern understanding of the many different forms of "insanity." The result is a clearer sense of the role of mad people and their allies in shaping one of the largest state expenditures in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--and, at the same time, a recovery of the social and political agency of these vibrant and dynamic "mad writers."

Victoria Wolcott has been awarded the 2025 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities. The SUNY-wide award recognizes Wolcott's work in scholarly and creative pursuits beyond teaching responsibilities. Wolcott is a social historian with expertise in areas that include the Civil Rights Movement, the New Deal, gender history, urban history, utopian communities and the history of leisure. Her eclectic interests and deep research program have consistently brought the insights of one field to reveal new perspectives in another. Wolcott was described by one colleague as “the most influential and talented historian working at the juncture of gender, race, recreation, and civil rights ideology in modern American.”

The author of three books as well as 16 articles and book chapters, she is currently a co-principal investigator for a prestigious $2.5 million grant from the Mellon Foundation. Through this study, she is helping build a research team tasked with documenting and analyzing the role of community networks in providing health care and related services to vulnerable people with limited resources. This research bridges the disciplines of public health, urban studies and disability studies, promising to support people and communities largely unrepresented in policy planning studies.

Wolcott’s first book, “Remaking Respectability: African-American Women in Interwar Detroit” (2001), explores the experience of Black women activists to produce a compelling interpretation of the internal complexities of the Civil Rights Movement. Her 2012 publication “Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters: The Struggle against Segregated Recreation in Postwar America” explored an area of the Civil Rights Movement that few historians have studied. Her most recent book, “Living in the Future: The Utopian Strain in the Long Civil Rights Movement” (2022), reveals the significant, but often unrecognized impact that utopian socialism and radical pacifism had on the Civil Rights Movement.

Recognized for her scholarly excellence, Wolcott received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in 2016 and has named a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians in 2012. Learn more via UB Now.

April 17, 2025 Teen Vogue  quoted Michael Rembis, associate professor in the Department of History and director of the Center for Disability Studies, in an article about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s comments that Americans “addicted” to opioids, antidepressants and stimulants should be sent to “wellness farms” to be “re-parented.”  Full article via Teen Vogue.

April 15, 2025  Salon quotes Michael Rembis, associate professor of history and director of the Center for Disability Studies, in a story about how Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cuts are making it harder for people with disabilities to live in their communities.  “It’s about shifting priorities and moving away from social support and things that people need to live their lives toward other priorities,” said Dr. Michael Rembis, a history professor and director of the Center for Disability Studies at the University at Buffalo. “The rhetoric is all in the name of cost-savings and efficiency, but it hasn't really been shown through any studies that I'm aware of that this is a more efficient or cost effective way to manage care.”  Full article via Salon.

February 27, 2025:  USA Today  quoted Michael Rembis, associate professor of history and director of the Center for Disability Studies, in an article about Elon Musk’s use of slurs on social media targeting people with disabilities. The article concludes that, if the language continues, it's "just another reminder that disabled people must continually fight for their rights and for their dignity," Rembis says. "This is a fight that disabled people and their allies are ready to take on; we will continue to speak out, protest, demonstrate, write, make art, tell our stories and work together to make a better, more accessible, more loving world."

January 24, 2025  A UB researcher was part of a committee writing a report outlining linkages between low-to-moderate alcohol consumption and health outcomes. The report was released last month by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and came out just weeks before U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy released a new advisory on the direct link between drinking alcohol and increased cancer risk.

The surgeon general’s advisory calls for updating the health warning labels on alcoholic beverages to include the greater cancer risk.

In addition to the relationship between moderate alcohol consumption — defined as two drinks in a day for men and one drink for women — and certain types of cancer, the National Academies report also examined linkages to seven other health outcomes, including cardiovascular disease, weight changes, all-cause mortality and neurocognitive health.

Jo L. Freudenheim, SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Environmental Health, School of Public Health and Health Professions, served on the 15-member Committee on the Review of Evidence on Alcohol and Health, which wrote the report at the request of Congress.

The report will help inform the next edition of the U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which was last updated in 2020. The next update of the guidelines, which are revised every five years, is expected to be released in the next few months.

The review on alcohol consumption and cancer — Freudenheim’s area of expertise — is a big part of the National Academies’ latest report.

“Within the research community, it has long been known that alcohol causes seven different kinds of cancer, and that there is a wealth of information about the impact of alcohol on breast cancer,” Freudenheim says. Past research, she notes, has found a linear association between alcohol use and breast cancer, meaning that drinking in low amounts has been shown to lead to a small increase in risk, while heavy drinking is linked to a proportionately larger increase in breast cancer risk.

“But there is less awareness within the general population of the relationship of alcohol to cancer, even though it’s been established for a long time,” Freudenheim adds. “That is beginning to change; people are becoming more aware of the health effects of alcohol. Understanding the role of alcohol in cancer is important.”

There is growing concern around the globe about the health effects of alcohol. In June, the World Health Organization issued a statement saying that “There is no form of alcohol consumption that is risk-free.” While the WHO provided more of a blanket statement, Freudenheim says she finds Canada’s guidance on alcohol and health to be more useful in that it outlines the continuum of risk associated with alcohol use, breaking that risk down by the amount of drinks consumed per week.

“The Canadian guidelines say that there is no amount without risk, but if you drink, here is the impact,” Freudenheim says. “There are things we do every day, like driving, that entail risk. The question with alcohol consumption is, what level of risk are we comfortable with, and how do we handle that?”

Alcohol and breast cancer risk

Freudenheim also co-authored a paper published last month in the journal Breast Cancer Research that examined the effects of quitting drinking compared to continuing drinking alcohol on breast cancer risk according to hormone receptor status: estrogen receptor positive (ER+) and estrogen receptor negative (ER-).

There are several different subtypes of breast cancer, Freudenheim explains, and there is evidence that there are differences in what causes these subtypes. “Alcohol is generally found to be more associated with ER positive than ER negative breast cancer,” she says.

The study suggests that alcohol cessation, compared to continuing to drink, is associated with lower risk of ER+ breast cancer and but not ER- breast cancer. One of the strengths of the meta-analysis conducted by the researchers is that the assessment of breast cancer risk for alcohol cessation was compared to that for continuing consumption rather than to abstention from drinking.

“The higher risk for cessation compared with abstention may be due to longer-term effects related to prior alcohol consumption,” the researchers say.

NEJM report

In 2023, Freudenheim was a co-author on a report in the New England Journal of Medicine in which the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) issued a summary review of alcohol reduction or cessation and cancer risk.

Freudenheim was part of a working group of 15 scientists from eight countries that reviewed published studies and evaluated the strength of epidemiologic evidence on the potential for alcohol reduction or cessation to reduce alcohol-related cancer risk.

“We found that for some kinds of cancer there’s not enough research yet, but for oral and esophageal cancer, there is strong research that if you cut down or stop drinking it will reduce your risk,” Freudenheim says.

Michael Rembis has received  The Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities. The award recognizes the work of those who engage actively in scholarly and creative pursuits beyond their teaching responsibilities. Rembis is an interdisciplinary historian who serves as director of UB’s Center for Disability Studies. His research interests include work in the fields of disability history and the history of medicine, specializing in what is generally referred to as the history of madness.

Rembis is the author of “Defining Deviance: Sex, Science and Delinquent Girls, 1890-1960,” “Disabling Domesticity” and “Disability: A Reference Handbook.” His latest book, “Writing Mad Lives in the Age of the Asylum,” will be published this winter. He has also co-edited works such as “Disability Histories” and “The Oxford Handbook of Disability History,” winner of the Disability History Association’s Outstanding Book Prize and the American Association for the History of Medicine’s George Rosen Prize. In 2012, with co-editor Kim Nielsen, he launched the “Disability Histories” book series with University of Illinois Press.

As a historian of disability and madness in the 19th- and 20th-century United States, Rembis uses innovative methodologies and “radical empathy” to explore the lived experiences of people confined to institutions and subjected to eugenic interventions. Rembis contends that while discrimination, marginalization and other forms of political oppression have been defining experiences for people with disabilities, they are only one aspect of their rich lives.

Colleagues say this approach has led to “path-breaking analyses” that have transformed the field by considering both disability as a social construct and the lives of people with disabilities.

His work, which has been foundational to disability history, has been funded by, among other organizations, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. A dedicated instructor and mentor of both undergraduates and graduates in multiple fields, Rembis received the UB Gender Institute’s Excellence in Mentoring Award in 2021.

News article intro by Buffalo Spree: Childbirth has been called the ultimate creative act and yet depictions of motherhood are conspicuously absent from art. Artist Julia Bottoms began confronting this imbalance nearly three years ago when she became a mother herself.  “This is all recent work,” Bottoms says, gesturing to paintings of mothers and children around her workspace at Buffalo Arts Studio. “Before, my work never really had children in it. Motherhood changed where my focus is.”  Continue reading Buffalo Spree.

Intro by WBFO: "This year’s Disability Pride Festival, held at the end of July, featured several disabled musicians, artists, poets, and performance groups from our area. Among them was MahataMmoho Collective, a dance group that began a grant-funded project at this year’s festival, and will share the results of the project at next year’s festival. WBFO’s Emyle Watkins sat down with founder Megan Rakeepile before their performance at the festival to hear about how dance can help our community rethink care and equity." Continue reading transcript.