Enfilade

This week-long summer seminar will take place at the American Antiquarian Society:

Disability Histories in the Visual Archive: Redress, Protest, and Justice
American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts, 9–14 June 2024

Led by Jennifer Van Horn and Laurel Daen

Applications due by 8 April 2024

The seminar will focus on the visual and material cultures of disability in eighteenth and nineteenth-century North America. Participants will hone their skills in visual and material culture analysis, learn key methods and theories, including cripping, and gain experience working closely with archives and visual materials that support disability history. We will explore the unparalleled collections of the AAS, especially the library’s exemplary graphic arts collection of prints, photographs, and ephemera as well as collections materials on related topics such as education and printing for the blind.

The seminar will interrogate disability as lived experience, analytical category, and site for creativity and protest. Centering the histories of diverse peoples, we will explore topics such as enslavement, colonization, indigeneity, gender, education, warfare, and disability rights. Participants will actively work toward disability justice by attending to understudied and obscured histories, by questioning how we can use visual and material things to redress past injustices and dismantle ableism, and by considering equitable archival access.

Interdisciplinary in approach, the seminar welcomes scholars across multiple fields and areas of expertise that might include art history, Black studies, design history, disability studies, medical humanities, histories of vast early America, Native and Indigenous studies, and visual and material culture studies. Librarians, museum professionals, and public historians are encouraged to apply. No previous experience in disability studies or visual culture is required.

Guest speakers will include Jenifer Barclay, Associate Professor of History, University of Buffalo and author of The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America (University of Illinois Press, 2020), and Erin Corrales-Diaz, Curator of American Art, Toledo Museum of Art.

Please follow this link for more information and instructions on how to apply.

The tuition fee for each seminar is $800, which includes meals throughout the week and evening receptions. Modest aid may be available for graduate students and early-career scholars to assist with travel and housing costs. Please feel free to reach out to Jennifer Van Horn with any questions (jvanhorn@udel.edu), or questions can be addressed to John J. Garcia, AAS Director of Scholarly Programs and Partnerships, jgarcia@mwa.org.

The seminar is sponsored by the Center for Historic American Visual Culture (CHAViC).