Jennifer Van Horn, professor in UD’s Department of Art History, has been named a 2026-2027 senior fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, a world-renowned research institute at the National Gallery of Art. Van Horn will join an exceptional community of fellows at the National Gallery in Washington D.C. who will pursue independent research. 

At the Center, Van Horn will advance her book project, To Make Otherwise: Disabilities and US Art History, 1780-1950, which asks how embracing disability as a creative mode of sensory engagement and imaginative rethinking of artistic processes changes our practice and understanding of art history. The project looks to the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth-century United States to center the creative productions of multiple marginalized disabled artists who approached making from unconventional vantage points spurred by their differing embodiments. Grounded in sensory interactions beyond the visual—touch, hearing, taste, smell, thermoception and proprioception—the project focuses on resistance, community building and world making through “misfit” creation in order to envision a cross-disability solidarity across art history.

Van Horn’s book project follows her recent teaching with graduate students in the department, which yielded a digital exhibition Reframing, Refocusing, Reimagining Disability. Student co-curators engaged with select artifacts from the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library’s collections to offer disability-centered interpretation in an accessible digital format with alt-text description. This project was one of several recent innovative projects by UD students that prepared them to shape the future of cultural institutions in the digital age.