Announcing the Winner of the 2024 Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in the Humanities

By: Haley Winkle and Danielle Coty-Fattal | Date: March 5, 2025 | Tags: Tobin Siebers Prize

Text Winner Announced over blue abstract background

The University of Michigan Press is pleased to announce that Affecting Disability on American Screens, by Angela Marie Smith, has been chosen for the 2024 Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in the Humanities. This prize is awarded yearly for the best-proposed book-length manuscript on a topic of pressing urgency in the field.

Angela Marie Smith is Associate Professor of Gender Studies and English and director of Disability Studies at the University of Utah. She is the author of Hideous Progeny: Disability and Eugenics in Classic Horror Cinema (Columbia University Press, 2012) and her research has been published in journals such as Literature and Medicine, Post Script, and Antipodes, and in edited collections The Matter of Disability (2019), Monsters: A Companion (2020), Embodying Contagion (2021), The Routledge Companion to Gender and Affect (2022), and The Evolution of Horror in the 21st Century (2023).

David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, series editors of Corporealities: Discourses of Disability at the University of Michigan Press, wrote, “We are proud to give Angela Marie Smith this award as her contribution to disability, film, and their impact on representations in film are unsurpassed in the field.”

About the book

Affecting Disability seeks to better understand why most mainstream disability representations remain so formulaic, routinized, and ableist. Taking up affective and disability theories and considering examples of moving-image culture from the earliest days of cinema to contemporary online media, the book traces the connections amongst the specific motions/emotions typically ascribed to disabled figures, the special effects used to simulate disability, and the affects produced in viewers. It invokes Tobin Siebers’ “disability drag” as an illuminating framework that highlights the use of non-disabled performances of disability to produce satisfying “ableist feelings.” It also finds “disability drag” an apt term in its evocation of the dragging and descending movements assigned to such performers to secure viewers’ ableist enjoyments. However, Affecting Disability also proposes two new terms to help us understand and navigate mainstream disability representations: “disability affectation” and “affecting disability.”

The Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in the Humanities

The work of the late University of Michigan faculty member, Tobin Siebers, has influenced Disability Studies in field-shifting ways since the publication of his prize-winning essay “My Withered Limb” in 1998. His subsequent scholarly publications including the books Disability Theory (2008) and Disability Aesthetics (2010) as well as essays such as “A Sexual Culture for Disabled People” (2012) quickly became pivotal works in the field. Siebers’s work has galvanized new scholarship in relation to questions of representation, subjectivity, and the entry of non-normative bodies into public space, and made the study of disability a central component (alongside gender, race, sexuality, and class) in analyses of the culture wars and identity studies.

To honor this remarkable legacy, the University of Michigan Press and the University of Michigan Department of English Language and Literature established The Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in the Humanities, now going on its tenth year. Reflecting the scholar’s work the prize commemorates, the competition invites submissions on a wide range of topics, from literary and cultural studies, to trans-historical research, to contributions to disability theory such as work in crip/queer studies.