Enfilade

From the Call for Papers:

Disabilities and American Art Histories
Commentaries for American Art, 2026

Organized by Laurel Daen and Jennifer Van Horn

Manuscripts (1500–2000 words) due by 1 April 2025

American Art, the peer-reviewed journal co-published by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the University of Chicago Press, seeks to publish papers that explore the intersections of disability studies and the histories of American art, architecture, and design. What perspectives, insights, and forms of redress does disability studies bring to American art history? Where does disability surface in American art and visual culture, and where do absences persist? How has art enacted ableism, spurred practices that challenge and move beyond exclusion and oppression, or combined divergent tendencies in complicated and generative ways? What are the responsibilities of art historians to advance disability justice in their scholarship, teaching, and museum practice? How do the histories of American art change when new ways of making or experiencing art are included?

We invite essays that center disability in American art history in compelling and innovative ways. We encourage authors to foreground critical disability studies methodologies and conceptualize disability broadly, recognizing that the meanings and terminologies of disability can vary across disciplines, experiences, identities, and histories. We welcome essays about how disability has been represented, conceptualized, and constructed via visual and material practices; how individual artists as well as communities, including those that reject the identity of disability, have defined themselves alongside and beyond changing understandings of abled-ness. We encourage authors to approach disability intersectionally and to center the histories of understudied peoples. We also invite reflection on how the discipline of American art and practices of extractive looking have perpetuated ableism.

Collectively these commentaries aim to reveal the centrality of disability and disability studies to our understanding of American art history, considering how such approaches can advance multiple fields and contribute to anti-ableist future practices. Please submit manuscripts of 1,500 to 2,000 words (including notes) with 3–5 images, to AmericanArtJournal@si.edu by 1 April 2025. We invite submissions from authors in and beyond art history, including crip studies, Deaf studies, design history, disability history, disability studies, Mad studies, material culture studies, the history of the body, the history of the senses, the history of technology, medical humanities, and visual culture/practices of looking.

The journal’s guidelines on originality, quality, and submission format apply; visit journals.uchicago.edu/journals/amart/instruct for details. Pre-submission inquiries may be directed to organizers Laurel Daen, University of Notre Dame, and Jennifer Van Horn, University of Delaware, at ldaen@nd.edu and jvanhorn@udel.edu. American Art will facilitate fully anonymized peer reviews and final decisions. Accepted manuscripts will be workshopped, rigorously edited, and published in American Art in 2026.