History of Medicine calls for papers / meetings & conferences

Call for Papers: Deaf World/Hearing World: Spaces, Techniques, and Things in Culture and History

Sponsored by the Max Planck Institute in Berlin and Project Biocultures, University of Illinois at Chicago

The history of deafness presents an exemplary model of a community’s mobilization for the recognition of a cultural identity. It is also an unequaled history of divisions across a broad range of pedagogy, techniques, and scientific inventions. Across the last four centuries at least, constructions of deafness as a cultural identity and/or as a disability have lead to opposite claims. Deafness became a focal point for arguments over citizenship, eugenics, language, theories of the mind, and the like. A different set of categories was produced to give voice to these claims and the dialogue between their supporters has been extremely difficult for lack of a common stake. Depending on the approach, one can say such a heated debate has given the question of deafness a very specific place among human variations. Sign language, in particular, has lead many to question the relationship between mind, body, and language.

We welcome papers on the social, cultural, scientific and philosophical attempts to mediate the space between the deaf and the hearing across history. Topics include the use of objects and techniques for creating a space of encounter, conceptions of the relationship between humans and language, language and thought, or language and society across time and space. We are seeking explorations of the dialectic between hearing and silence, deaf and hearing as well as the technologies and ideologies that intervene between the deaf world and the hearing world, the deaf person and the hearing person.

The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin in conjunction with Project Biocultures at the University of Illinois at Chicago will host the conference on December 10-11, 2012 in Berlin.

Please send your abstract to Thu-Tra Dang ttdang@mpiwgberlin.mpg.de by July 3, 2012.

Scholars will be informed by July 23 if their abstracts have been selected. A travel fund is available, please let us know when submitting your abstract if you need an allowance to cover part of your trip.

The conference will be in English and in sign language. The Max Planck Institute will welcome interpreters to make possible presentations in sign language. To facilitate the organization, please contact us as soon as possible if you need an interpreter of American/British/national sign language. Please mention the contact information of a couple of interpreters.

If you have questions please contact Sabine Arnaud at sarnaud@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de, or Lennard Davis at lendavis@uic.edu

If you plan to attend the conference without giving a paper and require special assistance, please send an email to Thu-Tra Dang ttdang@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de

Call for Papers for a Session on Health, Disease, and Physical Culture at the Northeast Popular Culture Association Annual Conference

The Northeast Popular/American Culture Association (NEPCA) is soliciting papers for topics in the area of Health, Disease and Culture for its annual meeting, which will be held October 26-26 on the campus of St. John Fisher College in Rochester, New York.

Topics in Health, Disease and Culture may include such themes as below: Mass media images of health and disease in popular culture--print, film, television, etc.

Portrayals of health institutions (e.g., hospitals, clinics, medical homes, pharmacies) and health professionals in history, literature or mass media

Portrayals of Prescription Drugs (E.G., Development, Marketing, Advertising, Consumption, Role in Treatment of Chronic Illnesses

Representations of the body in discourses of health and illness

Narratives of illness from patient and health practitioner perspectives in novels, short stories, memoirs, graphic comics, etc., discussed in larger sociocultural (ethnicity, race, gender, class), and political (health care system) contexts

Disability discourses in history, literature, and public policy

Outbreak narratives of infectious diseases (e.g., endemic, epidemic, pandemic) in popular media and literature; infectious diseases in history and public policy

Historical and contemporary perspectives on the promotion of health through diet, exercise, personal or domestic hygiene, cosmetic procedures, public health campaigns (e.g., smoking, obesity).

Focuses on Public Health: The Built Environment, Global Health, Emergency Preparedness, Occupational Health, Surveillance and Public Health

Creative Writing and Health Care Presentations from patient, caregiver, health professional or medical humanities practitioners, etc.

We invite both individual papers and proposals for complete panels (please include titles and abstracts for each panelist). Please send a 1-2 page paper proposal and a one-page vita to both the Program Chair Tim Madigan tmadigan@sjfc.edu and to the Area Chair for Health, Disease and Culture, Jennifer Tebbe-Grossman jennifer.tebbe-grossman@mcphs.edu. The deadline for submission is June 1, 2012.

Jennifer Tebbe-Grossman
Professor of Political Science and American Studies
School of Arts and Sciences
Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences-Boston
179 Longwood Avenue
Boston, Massachusetts 02115
Phone: 617-732-2904
Email: jennifer.tebbe-grossman@mcphs.edu

Call for Abstracts for a Session on Architecture and the Body: Science and Culture at the Society of Architectural Historians 66th Annual Conference

SAH is now accepting abstracts for its 66th Annual Conference in Buffalo, NY, April 10-14, 2013. Please submit abstracts for papers no later than June 1st for the thematic sessions or open session.

From the Vitruvian Man to Le Corbusier’s Modulor, the human body has served as both measure and metaphor in architectural design. In scholarly considerations of this relationship, it is often architecture which is seen to change while the status of the body remains static, a biological constant unaffected by historical time. This session is devoted to research which takes both buildings and bodies to be in dynamic and reciprocal evolution. It poses one overarching question: how does a period’s understanding of the body as a cultural subject or object of scientia impinge upon architectural thought or design? For instance, historians often observe that Gothic architecture appealed to the senses, but how had the understanding of the senses evolved at that time, and how was this knowledge framed culturally and then translated into new demands on space? How were traditions in mortuary architecture or places of execution affected by human dissections as early as the thirteenth century? How did the inscription of cultural values on the body help shape architectural form or organization? Whereas Barbara Stafford in Body Criticism brilliantly analyzed new relationships between aesthetic and medical practices in the Enlightenment – all made possible by the visibility of formerly unseeable parts of the world – this session emphasizes pre-Enlightenment cultures and science. Misconceptions of various “dark” ages or “dark” geographies can still blind historians to unlikely inspirations for architectural form in so-called pre-scientific societies. Theoretically adventurous submissions are welcome, as are those arguing for the full inclusion of the pre-modern era within research on sexed, medical, and architectural bodies as well as spaces and behaviors. Proposals on modern topics will be considered, provided they establish a transformation of a pre-modern condition. Session chair: Kim Sexton, Associate Professor, University of Arkansas; ksexton@uark.edu

Call for Papers: Disability and the Renaissance

Leeds Trinity University College, 8 September 2012

Proposals for 20-minute papers are invited on the ways in which disability can be conceptualised in/through/by the Renaissance. This seminar is particularly intended to register some of the ways that recent developments in disability theory might be applicable to scholarship on Renaissance literature and culture; to the modern tradition of Renaissance scholarship; or, indeed, might struggle to gain purchase upon the types of material and textual resources available to scholars. To that end, papers which focus on the experience or conceptualisation of disability itself, rather than disability as allegory/metaphor for the human condition in general, will be preferred.

We recognise that this is not an established field within Renaissance studies and we therefore welcome exploratory and open-ended engagements and investigations.

Topics may include, but are certainly not restricted to:

* The visibility and invisibility of disability: embodiment, Bedlam beggars, Bedlam and other sites/institutions, taxonomic practices, non-standard bodies, normativity.
* Resistance, conformity, subversion, transgression.
* The mind and mental disability.
* Representations: staging, portraying, discussing disability.
* Models of disability - how do the social and medical models bear on the Renaissance? Does the Renaissance offer further ways of modelling disability?
* Identity, difference, abjection.
* Technologies, adaptation, support.
* The impact of earlier traditions: e.g. Classical formulations of disability; folklore.
* Intersections: childhood; gender; ethnicity; class
* Medical, legal, moral, theological and spiritual understandings/engagements.

We invite proposals (250 words) for papers addressing these questions. Comparative, interdisciplinary, and performance-oriented approaches are welcome, as are submissions from postgraduate students and early career researchers. Please send your proposals or any queries to Susan Anderson: s.anderson@leedstrinity.ac.uk

Deadline for proposals: 30th June 2012.

Call for Papers: German Science in Southern Europe, 1933-45

October 11-13, 2012 Lisbon, Portugal

Submissions deadline: June 15, 2012

The European fascist period is certainly a time of exclusions, disruptions, and confrontations, but it is also a time of network building and scientific and cultural exchange: the exhibitions, public lectures, academic or even touristic exchange that Germany organizes between 1933 and 1945 in the southern European countries (from Portugal to Romania, not forgetting Spain, Italy or Greece) reflect a hybrid (i.e. political and scientific) concern to be "recognized and imitated" (to put it in the words of the Hamburger romanist and NSDAP member Wilhelm Giese).

The conference welcomes paper proposals from a broad range of disciplines. Questions that could be addressed, especially on case studies examples, might
include, but are not limited to:

a.. Knowledge & Technology transfer
b.. Circulation and appropriation of Knowledge
c.. Fascism, Science, Culture
d.. Fascist Scientific Policies
e.. Science and the Economics of War
f.. Networks: Actors, Institutions, Events, Disciplines
g.. Academics: Exchange and Exile
h.. Influence, Persuasion, Coercion: Science, Culture and the 'Weltanschauungskrieg'
i.. Crossing Borders: the Role of Science and Culture in the Internationalization of Fascism

The Conference is hosted by the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences, New University of Lisbon, and organized by the Research project The Power of Science; German Science in Portugal, 1933-45.

A selection of papers presented at the Conference will be published in a book.

Graduate and Postgraduate students are strongly encouraged to submit papers on research in-progress or recently completed studies.

Working language of the conference: English (a limited number of papers presented in Portuguese, Spanish or German may also be accepted)

Submission of Abstracts: Please submit a paper abstract (300 words) and a short CV at http://pos.fcsh.unl.pt/conference

Submissions deadline: June 15, 2012

Notification of Acceptance: June 30, 2012

Further Information:

Please address all inquiries to pos.conference@gmail.com

Fernando Clara
Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Av. de Berna 26-C
P 1069-061 Lisboa
PORTUGAL
Telf.: +351 217 908 300-Ext.1295
Fax: +351 217 908 308
email: f.clara@fcsh.unl.pt

Call for Papers: Tonics, Elixirs and Poisons: Psychoactive Substances in European History and Culture

Conference 8-9 September 2012 Wellington, New Zealand

Psychoactive substances, whether narcotics, stimulants or hallucinogens, affect their users as individuals, yet their social context informs their cultural significance. At different times and in different places, different substances have become a locus of fascination or anxiety, praise or opprobrium, patriotism or prohibition. We seek papers examining psychoactive substances in a specific cultural context. How, when, and why did substances such as alcohol, caffeine, cannabis, cocaine, opium, tea, and tobacco acquire the cultural meanings that they did? How have consumers of psychoactive substances crossed the border between medical and recreational use, and how has society responded to any perceived transgressions? How have these substances been represented in literary, journalistic, legal, or scientific texts?

We seek papers undertaking a detailed study of a specific substance in a specific time and place, and particularly encourage case studies of less-commonly studied societies, e.g. in Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, the Baltic, or the Balkans.

We expect to have a small budget to defray accommodation costs, but we will not be able to pay for plane tickets from Europe or North America. We can, however, send letters of invitation if necessary.

The Journal of Social History has also expressed interest in publishing a themed issue of selected papers. All papers will go through a standard peer-review process. For journal submissions, please follow the style guide for the Journal of Social History (Chicago-style end-notes, not in-text citations).

Your paper can be considered for the themed issue even if you are unable to attend the conference; similarly, you may attend the conference without submitting a paper to the themed issue. When sending an abstract, please specify whether you wish to be considered for the conference, the journal, or both. Send an abstract as soon as possible, but no later than 30 July 2012. Final papers will be due at the end of January 2013.

The conference will take place at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. The conference will have no registration fee, and will be open to the public. For further information, contact Alexander Maxwell or Richard Millington.

Alexander Maxwell alexander.maxwell(at)vuw.ac.nz
Richard Millington richard.millington(at)vuw.ac.nz

Victoria University of Wellington
PO Box 600
Wellington 6140
New Zealand

Visit the website at http://www.victoria.ac.nz/antipodean/upcoming-events.aspx

Call for Papers: Early Modern Medicine and Natural Philosophy

Center for the Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh
2-4 November 2012

We invite the submission of extended abstracts (approximately 1000 words) for individual paper presentations (reading time should be 30 minutes).

The aim of the conference is to bring to the fore the medical context of the ‘Scientific Revolution’ and to explore the complex connections between medicine and natural philosophy in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe. Medicine and natural philosophy interacted on many levels, from the practical imperative to restore and maintain the health of human bodies to theoretical issues on the nature of living matter and the powers of the soul to methodological concerns about the appropriate way to gain knowledge of natural things. And issues of life, generation, ageing, medicine, and vital activity were important topics of investigation for canonical actors of the Scientific Revolution, from Boyle, Hooke and Locke to Descartes and Leibniz. Recent efforts to recover the medical content and contexts of their projects have already begun to reshape our understanding of these key natural philosophers. Putting medical interests in the foreground also reveals connections with a wide variety of less canonical but historically important scientists, physicians, and philosophers, such as Petrus Severinus, Fabricius ab Aquapendente, Lodovico Settala, William Harvey, Richard Lower, Thomas Willis, Louis de la Forge, and Georg Ernst Stahl. This interdisciplinary conference will bring together scholars of Renaissance and Early Modern science, medicine and philosophy to examine the projects of more and less canonical figures and trace perhaps unexpected interactions between medicine and other approaches to studying and understanding the natural world.

Submission Guidelines

Please submit an extended abstract of approximately 1000 words and a 1-2 page CV to Peter Distelzweig at pmd17 [at] pitt [dot] edu.

Submission should have full institutional and contact information and should be in doc/docx or pdf format.

Deadline for submissions is 1 June 2012.
Decisions will be announced by 30 July 2012.

Partial funding will be available for accepted papers.

Call for Papers: Second Annual Washington University in St. Louis Graduate History Conference: The History of the Body

October 26-27, 2012 at Washington University in St. Louis

Keynote speaker: Professor Leor Halevi, Vanderbilt University

The Graduate Conference Committee of the History Department at Washington University in St. Louis invites graduate students to submit proposals for its second annual Graduate Conference.

We welcome interdisciplinary submissions for this broadly conceived topic, and are excited to see in what new and creative directions participants will take this theme. For example, the “History of the Body” might include bodies used for political and religious expression, gender and the body, sexualities, the body politic, the transgression of boundaries, the movement of people, changing ideas of “good” and “bad” bodies over time, and the idea of bodies in the formation and appropriation of personal and impersonal spaces. Very literal uses of the “body” as well as more representational and less-direct approaches are equally welcome.

The Graduate History Conference chooses a biennial rotating theme, allowing for deeper examination of historical problems and questions over a period of time. This year will be the second year to explore the “History of the Body,” and we are eager to see how this provocative topic will develop in the concluding installment of the conference.

Deadline for submission of proposals: June 1, 2012

Proposals for papers should be between 200-300 words. Final papers should be approximately 20 minutes in length. Individual papers as well as
proposals for panels will be considered. We welcome new as well as returning presenters. Please submit proposals to the conference website,
http://history.artsci.wustl.edu/GHA/Conference/Submissions. For any questions please contact Ethan Bennett at ethanrbennett@gmail.com.

Call for Papers: Disrupting Pathways: Endocrine Disruptors and the Public Expertise of Health and Environmental Problems

We are pleased to invite you to submit a paper for the international research workshop "Disrupting pathways: Endocrine disruptors and the public expertise of health and environmental problems".

The workshop will be held in Paris the 14th and 15th of December 2012 and will gather both US and European participants. It will be organized around three main themes: a) the 70s and 80s early qualification of pesticides, PCB's, Dioxins or drugs as endocrine disruptors; b) the convergence between medical and environmental problems taking place in the 1990s; c) the regulatory initiatives from the late 1990s onward.

Travel and accommodation costs will be covered.

Please send proposals to the organizers Nathalie Jas (jas@ivry.inra.fr<mailto:jas@ivry.inra.fr>) and Jean-Paul Gaudilliere
(gaudilli@vjf.cnrs.fr<mailto:gaudilli@vjf.cnrs.fr>) by the 30th of June 2012.

In the past twenty years endocrine disurptors, the category as well as specific substances, have acquired a peculiar visibility both as targets for research and as objects of political debates. Issues like the impact of pesticides on the health of farmers, consumers and wild animals, the long term effect of persistant pollutants like PCBs which seems impossible to eliminate, the relations of xenostrogens to declining fertility and reproductive cancer incidence in humans, or the peculiar sensitivity of fetuses and developing organisms to chemicals mimicking the structures and roles of hormones are now discussed through an increasing number of publications and affairs perfectly illlustrated with the current debates on the need for a complete ban of Bisphenol A.

The processes, which have led to this situation and the recognition of what may be called an endocrine disruptors paradigm linking in unprecedented ways research, expertise, regulation, and social mobilizations - producing knowledge at the crossroad of reproductive medicine, toxicology, ecology, epidemiology and the social sciences - are complex and far from self-evident.

In the mid 1990s, the importance of man-made and man-realesed chemicals and pollutants modifying endocrine/reproductive functions in animals and humans was a motive of serious concern in small circles of experts, often associated with environmental, feminist or public health activism. It was a US phenomenon in the first place. A quarter of century later it is no longer possible to locate in such a precise manner the actors of endocrine disruptors networks. They are in laboratories, conservatories, and hospital services but also in the medias, health or environmental regulatory agencies, as well as in political institutions. They are present in the United States, Europe and the so-called emerging countries. In parallel with its diffusion, its contested but significant acceptance, the endocrine disruptor paradigm has crystalized a body of knowledge challenging traditional toxicology and views of adverse effects; a body focusing on low doses, multiple exposure, cumulative effects and sensibility of development periods.

The role of the proposed seminar is to explore the advent of this endocrine disruptors paradigm from the 70s onward, i.e. to understand how specific problems and substances have been redefined to become manifestation of endocrine disruption, to understand the dynamics of social movements and their role in the public expertise of these processes, to understand the transformation of regulation, to explore the impact the debates on endocrine disruptions have had on specific fields and disciplines in scientific research.

This seminar is an element in a more general research project of the trajectory of endocrine disruptors as scientific and political entities, which seeks to address both their generalization and the deep differences in their modes of existence in Europe, especially in France, and in the United States.

The workshop will take place in Paris. It will gather both US and European participants. It will be organized around three main themes: a) the 70s and 80s early qualification of pesticides, PCB's, Dioxins or drugs as endocrine disruptors; b) the convergence between medical and environmental problems taking place in the 1990s; c) the regulatory initiatives from the late 1990s onward.

Nathalie Jas
Research Fellow
RiTME Research Unit - INRA
65 Bd de Brandebourg
94205 Ivry-sur-Seine
France

Tel: + 33 (0)1 49 59 69 81

Call for Papers: 8th International Symposium for the History of Anaesthesia

International Symposium on the History of Anaesthesia 2013, Sydney

The 8th International Symposium for the History of Anaesthesia will be held from January 22-25, 2013 in Sydney, Australia.

The Australian Society of Anaesthetists, the Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists and the New Zealand Society of Anaesthetists are pleased to announce that they are hosting the 8th International Symposium on the History of Anaesthesia (ISHA) in Sydney, Australia in January 2013.

The theme of the meeting: HISTORY MATTERS!

ISHA 2013 is administered by the Australian Society of Anaesthetists.

Abstracts must be received by July 15, 2012

Papers should relate to historical aspects of anaesthesia, critical care medicine, resuscitation and pain management. Abstracts on medical humanities or ethical topics that relate to the history of these areas are also invited. All papers and presentations are to be in English which will be the language of the Symposium.

Historical themes will include the relationship of the profession with industry, military anaesthesia, equipment, pioneers and notable names, regional anaesthesia, pain management, simulation, society and education, organisations, antiquity, subspecialty anaesthesia, veterinary anaesthesia, anaesthesia and the arts, anaesthesia mortality and others.

Presentations should be no longer than 15-20 minutes including 3-5 minutes for discussion. Presentations from trainees are very welcome.

Contact

Please contact the ASA for more information.

email: isha2013@asa.org.au
tel +61 2 9327 4022