Appel à contribution – Graduate Conference on the History of the Body

The Graduate History Association and the Department of History at Washington University in St. Louis are pleased to announce the inaugural Graduate Conference on the History of the Body, to be held October 20-21, 2011.

In 2001, Roy Porter remarked that body history had become the « historiographical dish of the day. » Ten years on, histories of the body continue to flourish. Often working at the interstices of a number of methods and approaches, the field has produced innovative and compelling articulations of the body as a category of historical analysis. As thinking about bodies has occasioned ongoing encounters, clashes, and border-crossings between a variety of disciplines, this conference aims to promote conversations across scholarly divides by showcasing and reflecting on graduate-level scholarship on the history of the body, in all periods and regions, and from a variety of methodological approaches. We invite papers related to a broad number of thematic areas, including but not limited to:

*normality and deviancy

*medicine and disease

*sexuality and reproduction

*food

*blood and race

*physical space

We’re also pleased to announce Professor Mary Fissell, renowned historian of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University, as the conference keynote speaker. Professor Fissell’s first book, Patients, Power and the Poor (Cambridge 1991), examined how patients’ choices shaped a health-care system in the eighteenth century. Her more recent Vernacular Bodies (Oxford 2004) explored the politics of reproduction in early modern medicine. Professor Fissell’s current project involves Aristotle’s Masterpiece, for three centuries the best-selling book about sex and reproduction. Her address will be held in conjunction with the Washington University in St. Louis Department of History Colloquium Series.

Graduate Students in any field of study are invited to submit proposals for individual research papers. Abstracts of approximately 250 words should be submitted online: http://history.artsci.wustl.edu/GHA/Conference. The deadline for submissions is June 1, 2011.