Reading Bodies, Writing Minds: Mental Health in the Medical Humanities
University of Nottingham, 2017
Call for Papers:
Reading Bodies, Writing Minds is a one-day conference to be held at the University of Nottingham on
13 April 2017. The conference will investigate representations from the arts and social sciences of
suffering, seeing, and treating mental illness. This interdisciplinary event is intended to foster
communication between different study areas and subjects and to that end we invite abstracts
addressing historical and modern entanglements of medicine and the humanities. The conference’s
two keynote speakers are Dr. Mary Ann Lund of the University of Leicester, specialising in
Elizabethan-era melancholy, and Dr. Chantelle Saville of the University of Auckland, speaking on
medieval theory of emotion.
All accepted papers will be considered for peer-review and potential publication in an edited volume
of conference proceedings.
For colleagues who wish to be considered to present a paper (not in excess of 20 minutes in length),
please submit by 1 February 2017 an abstract of no more than 250 words outlining the paper
and the area of research.
Submissions might include, but are not restricted to, the following topics:
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Historical perspectives on mood and emotion.
Metaphors and artistic forms commonly or historically associated with mental health.
Modern treatments or analogues of historical artistic approaches to mental health.
How medical texts and texts about mental health and illness represent and construct their
ideal reader.
Abstracts should be sent to: [email protected].
For general enquiries: please email the above address and address to Martin Brooks.