Cultures of Anxiety: A two-day interdisciplinary conference
June 8-9, 2017
University of Bristol
Keynote Speaker: Prof. Catherine Belling (Northwestern University)
Although it is notoriously difficult to define, anxiety has long been theorized in a variety of fields,
from philosophy to psychology, theology to neuroscience. Since 1980, when DSM-III separated
anxiety neurosis into ‘panic disorder’ and ‘generalized anxiety disorder’, our understanding of and
response to anxiety has become ever more pathologized, and the list of symptoms and types of
anxiety has changed and grown through DSM-IV (1994) and, most recently, DSM-V (2013). The
National Institute of Mental Health in the USA estimates that 18% of the population have some form
of anxiety disorder, with 3.1% affected by GAD, and others from panic disorder, PTSD, OCD, social
anxiety disorder and phobias. In the UK, the Mental Health Foundation estimates that between 2%
and 5% of British adults are affected by GAD, and that up to 30% of mental health cases in GP
surgeries are anxiety related. Anxiety is frequently comorbid with depression, which leads to even
higher figures.
While anxiety has existed for thousands of years, our understanding of it has developed markedly
over the last half-century or so, especially since it has been seen as a symptom of particular culturalhistorical contexts. Since W.H. Auden styled the post-war condition as the ‘age of anxiety’ in 1948,
each successive generation has claimed it for the zeitgeist (the British Library’s database lists
everything from Dunant and Porter’s The Age of Anxiety (1996), covering problems of the time such
as environmental destruction, AIDS and family breakdown, to Judith Warner’s Perfect Madness:
Parenting in the Age of Anxiety, from 2006). Most recently, there have been several reports in British
newspapers about a new wave of anxiety (‘Britain’s silent epidemic’, The Guardian, 2013; ‘Anxiety:
The epidemic sweeping through Generation Y’, Daily Telegraph, 2015). Much media analysis is
inclined to attribute this ‘epidemic’ to the pressures of contemporary life, such as those theorized by
popular writers Alain de Botton (Status Anxiety, 2004) and Oliver James (Affluenza, 2007), or to
relate new waves of anxiety to specific socio-political contexts such as the financial crash.
Simultaneously, there has been a noticeable publishing trend for anxiety memoirs that include
medical and cultural histories, e.g. Patricia Pearson’s A Brief History of Anxiety (Yours and Mine)
(2008) and Scott Stossel’s My Age of Anxiety (2014); there is even now an OUP Very Short
Introduction (2012). Other noteworthy books have appeared in 2015, including prominent
neuroscientist Joseph E. Le Doux’s Anxious: The Modern Mind in the Age of Anxiety, and Francis
O’Gorman’s Worrying: A Literary and Cultural History.
The conference will respond to some of these most recent trends in the study of anxiety by
considering how our evolving understanding of it as a cultural condition might affect the ways in
which we represent, discuss, and deal with it.
Proposals for papers of 15-20 minutes are invited. Possible topics and approaches might include:
•
•
•
Anxiety in philosophy / the philosophy of anxiety (anxiety and ethics; anxiety and aesthetics;
the phenomenology of anxiety; anxiety and agency etc.)
Literary anxiety / the literature of anxiety (poetic anxiety; anxiety and voice; anxiety and
form; anxiety and gender / race / sexuality; ‘anxiety of influence’; literary histories of anxiety
etc.)
Anxiety and education (anxiety and scholarship; anxiety in higher education; anxiety in the
school etc.)
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Anxiety in the media (depiction / representation / reporting of anxiety-related stories in
print, broadcast and digital media; anxiety and social media; anxiety and information;
celebrity culture and anxiety, or celebrity accounts of anxiety etc.)
Anxiety across cultures, societies and communities (culturally specific readings of anxiety;
the demographics of anxiety etc.)
The politics of anxiety (anxiety and globalisation; anxiety and economics etc.)
Anxiety in music; anxious art; anxious architecture
Anxiety across time (etymologies of anxiety; historical understandings of the term etc.)
Health anxiety
Therapy culture
We welcome proposals from established academics, early career researchers and PhD students.
Abstracts of no more than 250 words, together with a brief biography of 3-4 lines, should be
submitted to [email protected] by January 31st, 2017. Successful applicants will be notified by
mid-February.
This conference is generously supported by BIRTHA (Bristol Institute for Research in the Humanities
and the Arts).