Diane R. Wiener, Ph.D.
Effective January 1, 2019, Diane will join the Burton Blatt Institute as a Research Professor and Associate Director of Interdisciplinary Programs and Outreach. She joined Syracuse University’s Division of Student Affairs (now the Division of Enrollment and the Student Experience) in October of 2011, serving as the Founding Director of the Disability Cultural Center between October of 2011 and December of 2018. Diane has extensive experience in teaching, group facilitation, advising, mentoring, and consulting. She also has significant experience in program development and management, leadership, counseling, disability advocacy, assessment, and supervision. Diane has worked closely with people with disabilities/disabled people in non-therapeutic and therapeutic contexts, in accordance with sociocultural models of disability, for many years.
From 2005 to 2011, Diane served as an Assistant Professor at SUNY Binghamton in the Department of Social Work. Diane has also worked as a Graduate Teaching Associate and Instructor of Record at the University of Arizona, and as an adjunct faculty member and graduate advisor for the Master of Arts programs at the Prescott College Tucson Center. She worked with the Tucson Youth Development Midtown Neighborhood Project and the Tucson LGBTIQ Youth Suicide Prevention Project, as well as for many agencies and organizations in the social services and activist fields in New York, New Jersey, and Arizona, including in solidarity with adults marginalized by psychiatric oppression, seniors, children, and youth.
Diane earned her Ph.D. from the University of Arizona, majoring in Comparative Cultural and Literary Studies and minoring in Anthropology. She has a Postgraduate Certificate in Medical Anthropology, also from the University of Arizona. She received a B.S. in Animal Science from Rutgers University and an M.S.W. from Yeshiva University.
Diane is a founding member of the Syracuse University Contemplative Collaborative; she also serves on myriad other university committees, including the LGBTQA Justice and Advocacy Senate Committee. During the fall of 2016, Diane was appointed by Chancellor Kent Syverud as Co-Chair (with Barry L. Wells) of the University-wide Council on Diversity and Inclusion, reporting to the Chancellor, and continues to serve in that capacity with honor and gratitude.
Diane has published widely in a variety of academic subjects related to diversity, social justice, inclusion, pedagogy, and empowerment, with attention paid, in particular, to interdisciplinarity (including feminist and queer media studies, sociolinguistic and medical anthropology, critical theory), cross-disabilities perspectives, and the Mad Pride movement. Between May, 2016 and January, 2018, Diane blogged for the Huffington Post. Diane's first full-length poetry collection, The Golem Verses, was published in June, 2018, by Nine Mile Press in LaFayette, N.Y. Her poems appear in Nine Mile Magazine and Wordgathering; she has flash fiction forthcoming in Ordinary Madness (Weasel Press) and poetry forthcoming in Tammy. A poet since the age of 7, Diane also had poetry published during childhood.
Diane proudly and happily teaches various courses at Syracuse University, including for the Renée Crown University Honors Program.
