Jessica Cooley (Dana-Allen Dissertation Fellow, 2019-2020) has been awarded a 2022 ACLS Emerging Voices Fellowship and Liberal Arts Engagement Hub Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Minnesota. During this time Jessica will develop her groundbreaking dissertation “Crip Materiality: The Art Institution after the Americans with Disabilities Act” into a first book. Her work addresses the ways ableism pervades the fields of art history and visual culture, down to their understanding of the very fibers of art materials, their fabrication, and their subsequent conservation. By focusing on the treatment of the material condition of art objects and the buildings that house and display them, we can attend to the unperceived ways in which ableism informs how we treat what is understood to be physically deteriorating.
Read more about Jessica’s project here.