Julia Epstein is Director of Communications and Development for DREDF. She founded the Berkeley Special Education Parents Network (BSPED), a grassroots organization of parents of children with disabilities in the Berkeley Unified School District, in 1999. BSPED works with the Superintendent and district administrators, with teachers, and with advocacy agencies to improve programs and outcomes for students who are eligible for special education services in Berkeley.

Prior to her work with the disability community, Ms. Epstein was a technical writer and editor at PeopleSoft and at Gene Logic. She received a Diplôme Supérieure d'Études Françaises from the Université de Strasbourg, France, in 1972, a B.A. summa cum laude from Washington University in St. Louis in 1973, and M.A. (1976) and Ph.D. (1977) degrees in Comparative Literature from Cornell University. She has been on the faculties of the College of William and Mary, Drexel University, and Haverford College. At Haverford, where she taught beginning in 1986, she was Barbara Riley Levin Professor of Comparative Literature from 1992 to 1997. Ms. Epstein is the author of The Iron Pen: Frances Burney and the Politics of Women's Writing (University of Wisconsin Press, 1989) and Altered Conditions: Disease, medicine, and Storytelling (Routledge, 1995) and the co-editor of Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity (Routledge, 1991) and Shaping Losses: Cultural Memory and the Holocaust (University of Illinois Press, 2001). She has also published several dozen articles on eighteenth-century literature, legal and medical humanities, and cultural studies.