Literatures & Medicines Online Symposium April 23 2025
Literatures and Medicines Online Symposium April 23 2025.
Hosted by the Narrative, Culture and Community Research Centre at Bournemouth University, UK.
Narratives and representations of illness and wellness are always topical, whether they are the stories and legacies of historical figures such as Florence Nightingale or Mary Eliza Mahoney, published memoirs of illness or convalescence, or the activist manifestos of groups such as the contemporary graphic medicine collective—or the underpinnings of fictional, autofictional, poetic, and dramatic texts. These texts, therefore, have much to tell us about social norms and cultural practice, as they engage with hierarchies of power and changing legislations, document historical events and perceptions, and cast light on developing practices and social changes.
This seems particularly relevant in 2025, five years on from the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, when political decisions during early lockdown phases are being interrogated, the extent of Long Covid damage is becoming clearer, and discussions of individual vs. collective responsibility for health and wellbeing are becoming more complicated, if not fraught. Meanwhile, in the shadow of Covid discourses, other illnesses, bodily preoccupations, and considerations of wellbeing persist, filtering into literary representations and inviting the reconsideration of past narratives and frameworks.
We invite proposals for 15-minute presentations centred on representations of medicine, health, and illness in literatures. By pluralising ‘literatures’, we mean to be inclusive and capacious in terms of the format, period, genre, and origin of the primary text(s) considered: possibilities include but are not limited to graphic novels, life writing, poetry, drama, and fiction in different genres. We welcome interdisciplinary approaches.
As we are based in the seaside town of Bournemouth, with a history of convalescence and recuperation, we are particularly interested in papers that focus on the geographies, mobilities, and spaces of disease, care, and recovery, alongside broader topics, including but not limited to:
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Illness and disease
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Wellness rhetoric and narratives
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Nature and health
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Law and medicine
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Ethics and medicine
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Patient-centred narratives
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Crime and transgression in medicine
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Politics and medicine
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Medicine and power
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Consent and conflicts of interest
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Mind-body connections
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Science and technology in medicine
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Chronic and long-term illnesses
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Pandemic and lockdown
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Community, environment, and collective responsibility
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Ecological crisis, pollution, and health
Please submit your proposal of 150-200 words and a brief bio to litsampersand@gmail.com by February 15th 2025. For our website, see https://www.litsampersand.org/
Attendance and participation are free.
Conference organisers:
Dr Rebecca Mills, Senior Lecturer in English and Communication at Bournemouth University
Dr Samuel Walker, Senior Lecturer in Law at Bournemouth University
Dr Julia Round, Associate Professor of English and Comics Studies at Bournemouth University and Head of Narrative, Culture and Community Research Centre.
If you have any queries, please contact Rebecca at rmills@bournemouth.ac.uk
We have confirmed keynote speakers Professor Sam Goodman (Bournemouth University) and Dr Charlotte Mathieson (University of Surrey).
Sam has been involved in a number of publications and projects related to the medical humanities, and his most recent monograph The Retrospective Raj: Medicine, Literature & History After Empire (Edinburgh University Press 2022) linked his interests in literatures of the Cold War and the post-war period of decolonisation with his medical humanities work through a study of colonial medicine and the Anglo-Indian novel c. 1950-1990.
Charlotte is Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century English Literature, and her recent projects include a project on ‘Cultures of Suntanning in Late 19th to mid 20th Century Britain' as a British Academy Mid-Career Fellow. Her interests include cultural geography and skin studies.