Society for the Study of Southern Literature Conference 2026

“Building Spaces of Freedom,” March 28th-31st at Fisk University, Nashville, TN

Panel: 

Medical Humanities Across Species

Over the last two decades, the medical humanities has developed into a robust, interdisciplinary field, placing literary studies, history, philosophy, disability studies, and the arts in conversation with medicine to explore how cultural narratives shape—and are shaped by—experiences of illness and care. More recently, scholars have proposed the veterinary humanities, a parallel but distinct area of inquiry that similarly examines the cultural, ethical, and historical dimensions of animal health, including veterinary labor, interspecies care, and the narratives attached to nonhuman animals. Together, these fields offer complementary critical frameworks for understanding how issues of race, gender, and class are not only embedded in health and medical care, but move across the borders of species.  

This panel invites papers that consider human medicine, veterinary practice, or cross-species encounters in the US or Global South. The South is an especially rich place for thinking with the medical and/or veterinary humanities given its historical and ongoing entanglement with agriculture and plantation economies, racial violence, health inequities, and environmental precarity. In keeping with the conference theme, “Building Spaces of Freedom,” we are particularly interested in papers that consider how medical and/or veterinary care reimagines freedom, justice, and even joy in the South. 

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Narratives of illness, disability, or medicine in southern literature, film, video games, archives, or other materials

• History of Black medical, nursing, or veterinary schools

• Human medical care, infrastructure, and ethics 

• Queer or feminist frameworks 

• Histories of medical or veterinary training

• Narrative medicine

• Agricultural labor and racial uplift

• HBCU agricultural or veterinary programs 

• Cooperative farming, such as Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farm

• Plantation medicine

• Medical affect and emotions

• African American midwifery 

• Histories of southern public health

• Black and/or Indigenous practices of healing

• Veterinary labor on plantations

• Veterinary care, rural infrastructures, and the cultural meanings of animals or animal health

• Narratives of epidemics, zoonoses, or cross-species diseases

• Medical experimentation

• Psychiatry and narratives of mental illness

• Mad Studies

• Carceral spaces

• Dog fostering in prisons

• Animal testing 

• Wellness and self-care movements

• Medical or veterinary photography/film  

• Colonization and human or veterinary medicine 

• Zoos, aquariums, wet markets, sanctuaries, or rehabilitation centers 

• Climate change and southern ecologies 

• Disability and animal assistance 

• Natural disasters 

• Countercultural and/or alternative medical practices

• Toxic exposure, pollution, and multispecies health 

• Health Humanities and One Health

• Vaccination campaigns 

• Companion animal medicine, access to veterinary care 

• Eugenics and reproductive control 

• Digital medicine, Chat GPT, AI

• Medical care and technology 

Please send abstracts of 250 words and brief bios of 150 words to Savannah DiGregorio, savannah.digregorio@asu.edu and Sarah Hagaman, sarah_hagaman@urmc.rochster.edu by Friday, December 12th.