CALL FOR PAPERS
Framing and Imagining Disease: The Ancient to Modern Worlds
International Colloquium, New College, Oxford, Saturday 26 October and Sunday 27 October 2002.
Following our meeting in Paris in May, this message is to confirm the date of the two-day colloquium at New College, Oxford, in October, and to make a final call for papers. Please note that we have opened up the chronological boundaries to include the ancient world and the 20th century.
If you are interested in making a formal, 20 minute presentation, and submitting a 6,000 word paper for possible publication in a collection of proceedings, please submit an abstract to David Haycock
(david.haycock@wolfson.ox.ac.uk) by 7 July 2002.
If you have already submitted an abstract, the final date for the submission of your draft paper is 30 September 2002.
If you have any queries regarding the colloquium please contact David Haycock. A full list of presenters and the titles of their papers will be sent out in mid July.
Statement:
The cultural understanding of medicine includes treatment of the frames and forms of imagination through which, and inside which, disease is constructed. These formative processes are complex and ordinarily require broad historical contexts for their conceptualization. Their problematic is
multiple: the many meanings given to pain, suffering, deprivation, death and, especially, the illness diagnoses offered by medical practitioners. But they also construe language and discourse as inherent to the process. For these reasons, narrative, genre, and metaphor assume larger roles than are ordinarily apparent in the work of historians of medicine and others specialists interested in the historical formation of disease. The "frame" then is an inherently interdisciplinary grid in the sense that it belongs to no single discourse or historical or national mentality.
We invite papers from any historical era or geographical region which approach the framing and imagining of disease in some of these ways. While we are not prejudiced against theoretical formations or the privileging of particular themes and tropes, we will give preference in this colloquium to scholars whose approach is primarily empirical and historical, and - crucially - to those who aim to have their work included in the volume now in preparation.
Convening Committee:
Professor George Rousseau, De Montfort University, Leicester; Kirstie Blair, Keble College, Oxford; Miranda Gill, New College, Oxford; Dr David Haycock, Wolfson College, Oxford; Malte Herwig, Merton College, Oxford