Call for Papers

2025 EALA Annual Conference

Disease and Death

Conference Co-organizers:

English and American Literature Association (EALA, Taiwan), National Taipei University of Education and University of Taipei

Date: October 18, 2025

Venue: National Taipei University of Education

The deadline for abstract submission is extended to February 25, 2025

In people’s “distribution of the sensible,” disease and death are two awkward issues that are seeable, yet unsayable. In works of English literature, however, there are various ways to represent these two motifs. Beowulf, for instance, started with the ship burial of Shield Sheafson, the first King of Denmark, and ended with the cremation of Beowulf. With the deaths of those two kings, the whole epic pervaded with a tone of elegy and revealed an uncertainty of life in the world of heroes. Alfred Tennyson, as the waves were breaking on the shore, accentuated the speaker’s grievousness over a good friend’s death with a sharp contrast between joy and loss. Tom Stoppard ridiculed a whodunit by laying a corpus on the stage throughout the performance. Edgar Allen Poe created a creepy atmosphere through a lunatic first-person narrator with an extraordinarily acute sense of hearing. Katherine Anne Porter mimicked a dying granny’s distraction with a stream-of-consciousness technique. John Green made his readers reexamine the meaning and value of life with a romance of two teenage cancer patients. There are countless examples like this in English literature; therefore, disease and death are not only sayable, but also loquacious.

Disease and death have different functions in the narrative structures of literature, and their representations are affected by spatio-temporal milieus, ideologies, and developments in medical technology. In short, literary representations of disease and death are deeply influenced by the social-historical contexts. Inspecting disease and death in literature with Michel Foucault’s idea of “discourse,” one may see a complex relationship between literary representations of disease and death and a certain social mainstream discourse. That relationship involves integration, strengthening, revision, resistance, etc. So, how representations of disease and death in literature shaped or challenged medical, health, and life discourses, and how those discourses influenced representations of disease and death become topics worthy of investigation. Besides that, philosophers or political theorists like Georges Canguilhem, Georgio Agamben, and Achille Mbembe also shed light on the issues of disease and death. If one delves into the topic through different theories and perspectives, one can thoroughly examine the relationship between disease/death and say, gender, queerness, politics, colonization, death drive, life education, or patient subjectivity, and thus enrich the meaning and practicality of literary representation of disease and death.  

The conference welcomes contributors from all over the world. Potential topics include, but not limited to the following motifs:

lRepresentations of disease and death

lViolence and death in popular literature

lLiterature and medical discourse

lDisease and gender

lDisease and aging

lDisease and colony

lNeuronormativity and neurodiversity

lChildren and bereavement

lDisease and identity (gender, race, class, LGBTQ, species)

lTechnology, culture, and disease

lPolitics of disease

lBody and autonomy of patients

lDoctor, witch-doctor, healer, quack as a detective

lMass mortality: genocide, war, natural disaster, and plague

lDisability and normalization

Please submit abstracts of 300-500 words (with a title and five keywords, for individual papers and pre-formed panels) and brief bios (which include name, title, affiliations, selected publications, contacts of each of the presenters) to wclai@mail.ntue.edu.tw by February 15, 2025.

Notification of acceptance: Before March 10, 2025

Full paper submission deadline: October 11, 2025

※Before participating in the conference and publishing your paper, you must have or obtain an EALA membership.

※EALA encourages contributors to submit a revised version of their paper to the “Review of British and American Literature,” which is a THCI first-level journal, after the conference.