Literature and Medicine meetings & conferences

Altered Consciousness in Relation to Popular Culture

16-17 November 2013 Queen Mary, University of London, United Kingdom

This meeting will explore the theme of altered consciousness in relation to popular culture, psychology, philosophy, religion, medicine and literature during the period 1918-1980.

Many literary and popular authors and performers during the mid twentieth century represented altered states of consciousness in their work, responding to and participating in research relating to such topics as interplanetary contact, ESP, clairvoyance, telepathy, mind-altering drugs, psychic therapies, spiritualisms, shamanism, erotics, conversion, revivals, somnambulism, precognition, distraction, group mind, multiple personality, hypnotism, lucid dreaming, Vedanta, hysteria and automatism.

What was the continuing legacy of nineteenth-century approaches to mind and spirit? How did work at the fringes of psychiatry and psychology intersect with mind sciences that consolidated their authority during the mid-twentieth century? What are the key interactions between European, North American and non-Western sources? How did investigations cross the borders between arts, sciences, religion, education and the military?

This event is generously supported by: the British Society for the History of Science, and the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, the Centre for the History of the Emotions, and the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary, University of London.
 

Victorian Body Parts

St Bartholomew’s Pathology Museum, Clerkenwell, United Kingdom Saturday 14th September 2013

The Victorian Body Parts Conference is an interdisciplinary event for postgraduate and early career researchers, and will be held on Saturday 14th September 2013 at St Bart’s Pathology Museum, Clerkenwell.

It is supported by the British Association for Victorian Studies and the Birkbeck Centre for 19th Century Studies.

The conference is being organised by Beatrice Bazell and Emma Curry, both in their 2nd year of PhD research at Birkbeck, working on representations of body parts in Victorian culture.

Why were the Victorians so interested in atomizing the body? What was causing nineteenth-century bodies to come apart at the seams? From articulated bones to beating hearts, from wooden legs to hair bracelets, from death masks to glass eyes, the Victorian body was chattering with its own discorporation.

The results of this fragmentation are successors to the recent scholarly work on material culture in examining the atomisation of the body as a symptom of being surrounded by the commodities generated by the nineteenth century. From objects under glass domes to pieces of the body in glass cases (authentic specimens of which fill St Bartholomew’s Pathology Museum), commodification and dissection have much in common.

This conference thus seeks to explore, develop and enrich perspectives on the numerous and varied ways in which the Victorians approached their anatomy, bringing together postgraduate, early career and established researchers to consider why body parts provided such an urgent and stimulating focus within the nineteenth-century cultural imagination.

Blog:victorianbodyparts.wordpress.com                       

Twitter: @victbodyparts

2nd International Conference Disability Studies--The Art of Belonging

The 2nd International Conference Disability Studies “The Art of Belonging” will take place October 31 - November 2,  2013 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Keynote speakers are amongst others: Ann Turnbull, Simi Linton and Hans Reinders. They will highlight the art of belonging, a focus that traverses the tensions between disability experience, the art of living and belonging.

IASSIDD Academy preconference workshops will be held on Thursday afternoon 31 October 2013.

Art Exhibtion

During the conference art works of the artist Bert Janssen will be presented in several conference rooms. One of his paintings "True Colors" is used for the logo of the conference.

Contacts

For additional information and any questions you may have on 2nd Disability Studies International Conference 2013, please contact the conference office PAOG: paog@vumc.nl

4th International Conference of Comics and Medicine

2013 Brighton Conference

Ethics Under Cover: Comics, Medicine and Society

5th-7th July 2013 Brighton and Sussex Medical School, United Kingdom

Brighton and Sussex Medical School in collaboration with Brighton and Sussex University Hospital Trust and Graphic Medicine invites papers for the fourth international conference on Comics and Medicine. Previous meetings have been held in London, Chicago and Toronto (more information at www.graphicmedicine.org).

This interdisciplinary conference intends to appeal to a wide audience, including healthcare professionals, comics creators, students, academic scholars, comics enthusiasts, and various stakeholder groups. The meeting will consist of a mix of peer reviewed academic papers, lectures and workshops. There will also be an exhibition and stalls for participants’ work.

Crimes of Passion: Representing Sexual Pathology in the Early 20th Century

Conference dates: 24-26 July 2013, Münster, Germany

The discourse on sexual pathology claimed a central position in modern European culture almost as quickly as it began to establish itself as a scientific discipline. The bonds between science and culture seem all the more visible when it comes to the science of sexual deviance, as many sexual scientists were quick to point out in their works.

Without empirical or statistical material at hand, the scientists turned to other sources of knowledge in order to legitimize and systematize sexual pathology. Their earliest case studies came from literature. Indeed, certain authors found themselves under examination, as sexual themes in their books were treated as evidence of pathological fantasies. These literary perversions became the basis for sexual pathologists’ scientific interpretations and psychological analyses. As part of the formation and development of the discipline, the connection between sex and crime also played a central role in the scandals, injustices, and power struggles associated with sexual pathology in the early 20th century.

The popular reception of works by Richard Krafft-Ebing, Magnus Hirschfeld, or Erich Wulffen, in addition to their contested scientific reception, attest to a wide interest in social deviation with sexual deviants being just one particularly scandalous branch of alterity. Indeed, deviation is the Other to that which is socially accepted, legitimate, and institutionalized. Social deviance by definition breaks course from what is construed as “normal.” The deviant breaks with the social order and, depending on the particular historical and political configuration, might be dealt with as a criminal. The debate surrounding Paragraph 175 of the German penal code that made sexual relations between people of the same sex illegal highlights the virulent history of how sexual deviance and crime were yoked together. Paragraph 175—enacted in the 19th century, but which was not completely repealed until 1994—brought certain sexual relations with their own specific social and cultural sanctions into the juridical realm of penal codes and state regulation. A significant part of this new institutionalization of sexual deviance (both academically and in terms of the law) involved thematizing gender roles, especially questions of “the female.” The pathologization of femininity was famously and scandalously presented by Otto Weininger in his Geschlecht und Charakter, a work that marks another controversial episode in the history of sexual pathology and modernism.

The conference Crimes of Passion focuses on the triad of sexuality, criminology and literature during the early decades of the 20th century.

‘Attentive Writers’: Healthcare, Authorship, and Authority

Medical Humanities Research Centre, University of Glasgow, United Kingdom 23-25 August 2013

Conference Committee: Dr. David Shuttleton, Dr. Gavin Miller, Dr. Elizabeth Reeder, and Dr. Megan Coyer

From nurses, physicians and surgeons to administrators, caregivers, technicians, veterinarians and voluntary sector workers, this conference adopts the term ‘attentive writers’ as evocative of the multitude of both non-professional and professional caregivers – clinical and non-clinical healthcare workers – whose attention to illness might take narrative form. The study of physician-writers was one of the earliest developments in the related fields of Literature and Medicine and the Medical Humanities, with canonical figures such as Conan Doyle, Goldsmith, Keats, Smollett, and William Carlos Williams, receiving much-deserved critical attention. Echoing Rita Charon’s concept of ’attentiveness’, this conference brings this established field of enquiry regarding ‘the physician as writer’ into dialogue with recent calls for a more inclusive approach to the Medical Humanities (i.e. ‘Health Humanities’) and questions the authoritative place of the Western – traditionally male – physician in our explorations of the humanities/health interface.

The relationship between healthcare, authorship and authority will be addressed through three inter-related strands  of thematic enquiry: (1) an historical and literary examination of ‘attentive writers’; (2) a more devolved interrogation of the field of Narrative Medicine; and (3) an examination of ‘attentive writing’ as creative practice.

Any queries may be directed to: megan.coyer@glasgow.ac.uk

Symposium on Reading and Health in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800

Medieval and Early Modern Research Group, Newcastle University, United Kingdom 05-06 July 2013

This symposium will explore how early modern texts engage with the regulation of the body and mind through reading. It will investigate the connections between reading and health and consider how reading was understood as an embodied practice in the period with profound implications for both personal well being and conception of the healthy body politic.

Infertility in History, Science and Culture

4 July 2013 - 5 July 2013 University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom

This symposium will explore the history of infertility, and the place of infertility in science and culture. Our primary focus is historical, but we welcome contributions from scholars in different disciplines and employing a range of approaches – social scientific, literary, feminist, psychological, and legal. We aim to bring together researchers working on this fascinating and under-explored field in order to better understand historical and contemporary representations and experiences of infertility across different cultures and from different perspectives.

Organiser(s): Gayle Davis (University of Edinburgh) and Tracey Loughran (Cardiff University)

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

the role of gender, class and race in shaping experiences and representations of infertility;
individual, familial, and social contexts of infertility;
infertility as a bodily and/or psychological experience;
heterosexuality, homosexuality, and involuntary childlessness;
reproductive science and access to reproductive technologies;
the interplay of medical, scientific, and cultural understandings of infertility;
the role of politics, law, and religion in shaping experiences of and attitudes towards infertility;
changing experiences of infertility across time and space, including comparative histories;
the relation of perceptions of infertility to beliefs about fertility control, the constitution and social role of the family, and sexuality;
different disciplinary approaches to infertility.

An edited collection based on the presented papers is planned.

The symposium is co-convened by Gayle Davis (University of Edinburgh) and Tracey Loughran (Cardiff University). It will be held at the University of Edinburgh on 4-5 July 2013.

Registration deadline: 30 April 2013

Contact details
Tracey Loughran
LoughranTL@cardiff.ac.uk

VariAbilities: A Conference on the History and Representation of the Body in Its Diversity

4-7 July 2013 Emory University Atlanta, Georgia

It is no longer useful to distinguish people by the binary opposition able-bodied/disabled. We now recognize people on a continuum of ability on which no-one is entirely able-bodied or entirely disabled. But was it always true? And if it is true now, does this require that we reconsider the use of binary oppositions when understanding people and their capabilities? VariAbilit(ies) is an interdisciplinary conference which will explore these questions. It will focus on the body and how it was treated and represented throughout history. Subject areas will include: Literary representations The Asylum The History of Poor Relief Gender/ Sexuality Disability and Aesthetics Disability and Race among other topics.
 

Melancholy Minds and Painful Bodies: Genealogy, Geography, Pathogeny

University of Liverpool, United Kingdom 9-11 July 2013

One of the major developments in the study of melancholia over the last thirty years has been the rise to aesthetic and cultural prominence of varieties of negative emotions proposed and discussed as melancholy, including different conceptions, analyses, and portrayals from grief to insanity. Most recently, Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia(2011) happens to be the melodramatic adaptation of the concept fuelled by cinematic symbols. Correspondingly, often observed as ‘a central European discourse’, melancholia has resurfaced to embody complementary or paradoxical notions not merely in the literary analysis of texts and contexts, but it has also emerged to retrieve its historical categorization. The cultural and social history of emotions entwined with modern medical and psychiatric lexicalization has opened new pathways to provide relative definitions of melancholia. However, theories about the choice of analogies for melancholy, whether aesthetic, cinematic, religious, or medical, somehow fail to distinguish the connections between contrary factors involved in melancholia.

It is also noteworthy that theories of characterization, no matter of what kind, tend to reformulate and evaluate contrary factors for the sake of preserving ‘superiority’ according to prevalent taste at each moment in time. In Britain, for example, individual and collective melancholia has been appreciated as a sign of genius and national pride at one time and announced as a national malady at another. Analogous is the contemporary history of behavioural rather than cognitive attributes to grief, e.g. tearfulness. Pain, in comparison, is bodily and often mental distress which in the past was closely perceived in relation to melancholia, but today research on pain is divorced from depression let alone melancholy. Thus, we miss the ‘melancholy-pain bridge’ in contemporary scholarship of mental and physical suffering. On the other hand, while pain is seen through the lens of universality, with management models stretching from Chinese medicine to Latin America, melancholia has rarely been investigated beyond the Western borders with regard to its genealogy, pathology, pathogeny, and management. Whether this geographical focus is a matter of re-establishing pre-eminence or in want of psycholinguistic reference, thereby centred on a gap in universal scientific communication, it invites intriguing and challenging enquiries.

Possible topics

Diversity in the geography of melancholia and pain
The relationship between Western theories of emotions and Oriental conceptions
The European hypothesis of melancholia-pain in non-European cultures
Orientalism, grief, and abstinence
Emotionality as negativity
Gender attributes and tearfulness
Art history, muscle tension, and the painful posture
Interpretation, assumption, semantic relation
Fear, Pain, and melancholy dominance
Depression and pain
Paranoia, melancholia, and pain
Misconceptions; cyclothymia and bipolar disorder
Melancholy appropriation, ethnicity, multicultural perspectives
Cosmology and elegiac pain management
Cinematic symbols
Literary emotionality, fictive superiority
Embodied cognition
Anaesthetics, the relationship between medical management and other models
Lyric manifestation of melancholy and pain