Wilson College Humanities ConferenceConference Theme: Healthcare in/and Humanities

Friday May 28 1:00pm-5:00pm EST and

Saturday May 29, 2021 8:00am-12:00noon EST
Held online via Zoom
sponsored by Wilson College’s M.A. in Humanities Program and undergraduate major in Healthcare and Medical Humanities

After an extraordinary year in which healthcare systems around the world came to the forefront of both national and individual consciousness, the Wilson College Humanities Conference seeks—in part—to interrogate 2020 by focusing its theme on “Healthcare in/and Humanities.”

            The humanities focuses on the study of society and culture, on the norms and products that humans both create as representations of the self and as signposts that structure and form society. And yet an event as cataclysmic as a global pandemic upsets every societal norm and disrupts every form of cultural product. We seek to understand better the relationship between health, care, and healthcare and the humanities, broadly speaking, by exploring and examining the many areas and arenas in which healthcare and the humanities intersect.

            The goal of this conference, then, is to bring together humanities students and scholars alongside health students, scholars, and practitioners to articulate, understand, and explore what is generated when the humanities and healthcare come together. For, indeed, it is the belief of the conference organizers that such collaborations—whether incidental or long-maintained—act as moments of creation and understanding. As such, each area has much to learn from the other, and humanities and healthcare scholars and students can only grow from coming together in an atmosphere of study and collaboration.

            To that end, we plan to allow those submitting abstracts to interpret the conference call broadly. We seek papers that explore the manifestation of health, healthcare, and medicine in traditional humanities products (literature, art, film, theater, philosophy, relics, culture, etc.) as well as the ways in which healthcare scholars and practitioners may use these products in their own work, pedagogy, and/or research. Most importantly, the papers should seek to broaden our understanding of how each discipline can learn from the other, can benefit the other, and how each can grow within the presence of and with the support of the other.

Faculty, graduate students, and independent scholars/practitioners are all invited to submit.

Undergraduate students may also submit abstracts, but their submission must include a letter of support from a current faculty member at their institution. (For more on this, please contact the conference director.)

To submit a presentation, please send an abstract of approximately 200 words to the email address below.

Send abstracts to:
Dr. Michael G. Cornelius
Program Director, MA in Humanities
Wilson College
HumanitiesConference@wilson.edu

Submit the abstract as either a .rtf, .doc, or .docx file, or simply place it into the text of the email itself.

Please be sure that your abstract includes your full name, your affiliated institution (if there is none, simply note that), your email, and the full title of your presentation.

Individual presentations will last no more than 15 minutes; panels of up to 3 individuals may be submitted as well. Special panels, roundtables, or panels of creative approaches are happily considered; please contact the conference director for more information. Each conference participant may submit only one abstract.

Abstracts are due by MARCH 25, 2021.

The conference is sponsored by Wilson’s M.A. in Humanities program and program in Healthcare and Medical Humanities.