Jessica Horvath Williams Part of Emmy Win
Cheers for Assistant Professor Jessica Horvath Williams, who co-hosted a Twin Cities PBS Original program that has won a 2024 Upper Midwest Regional Emmy Award! Horvath Williams also served as a research consultant and writer for "Art + Medicine: Disability, Culture, and Creativity," winner of the category "Arts & Entertainment, Long Form Content." Debuting in November, 2023, the hour-long special is still available for viewing. It is part of Art + Medicine, an ongoing TPT series exploring healthcare through story, song, and the arts, produced in collaboration with the Center for the Art of Medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School.
The Emmy-winning program spotlights artists and healthcare clinicians who are creating alternative perspectives on disability, through disability, in stories and performances, redefining what society perceives as normal. Disabled people form the largest minority population in the US, including those born with disabilities and those who become disabled due to disease, injury, and age. As Horvath Williams notes at the beginning of the program, "If we're fortunate to live long enough, we will all have changes to our hearing, vision, mobility, or minds that can be understood as disabilities. Yet as a society, we persist in understanding disability as a problem rather than as a typical part of the human experience."
A medical industry, and a society, that defines "disabled" bodies and minds against "normal" bodies and minds can "lead to differences in power, inclusion, and exclusion," adds Horvath Williams in the special. "Because it is not just defining what is normal, but who is normal."
Artist and storyteller Kevin Kling and Doctor Tsegaensh Selameab joined Professor Horvath Williams as co-hosts. Among the Minnesota artists featured in the program are musician Gaelynn Lea, multidisciplinary artist Gabriel Rodreick, ceramicist Donna Ray, and storyteller Allison Broeren, as well as MFA alum and poet Said Shaiye and Associate Professor and poet Douglas Kearney.
Horvath Willliams serves on the leadership team for the Critical Disability Studies Collective at the University of Minnesota. She researches at the intersection of critical disability studies and nineteenth-century US history and literature, with particular emphasis on domestic and slave labor and early eugenicist discourse. Her work has appeared in Studies in American Fiction. Horvath Williams was a President's Postdoctoral Fellow for the Departments of English (2021-2022) and Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies (2020-2021). She earned a PhD in English Literature from UCLA in 2020.
