Chers et chères Collègues,
Nous vous prions de bien vouloir trouver ci-joint un appel à communications pour le Colloque sur “Critical Health: Feminist Perspectives on Health and Well-Being in the Nineteenth-Century United States” (Sorbonne Université /  Universität zu Köln) qui se tiendra les 17 et 18 octobre 2025 à Sorbonne Université.Les propositions de communication (de 350 mots environ) peuvent être envoyées par courrier électronique à l’adresse suivante :criticalhealthconference@gmail.com avant le 10 février 2025, accompagnées d’une brève bio-bibliographie. Pour les propositions de panel, veuillez ajouter, en plus du descriptif de chaque communication (env. 350 mots), une brève explication des objectifs du panel.La langue du colloque sera l’anglais.Bien cordialement,

Alice de Galzain et Johanna Pitetti-Heil

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Dear colleagues,

We are delighted to share with you the call for papers for our conference on “Critical Health: Feminist Perspectives on Health and Well-Being in the Nineteenth-Century United States” (Sorbonne Université /  Universität zu Köln), which will be held at Sorbonne Université on 17-18 October 2025.

Please send paper proposals (350 words) and panel proposals (350 words per paper plus a short framing statement) as well as a short bio to Johanna Pitetti-Heil and Alice de Galzain at criticalhealthconference@gmail.comby 10 February 2025.

The conference will be in English.

Best regards,

Alice de Galzain and Johanna Pitetti-Heil

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Call for Papers

Critical Health: Feminist Perspectives on Health and Well-Being in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Paris, France, October 17-18, 2025

Conference Organizers: Dr. Alice de Galzain (Sorbonne Université) and Dr. habil. Johanna Pitetti-Heil (Universität zu Köln)

 

In a letter addressed to Ralph Waldo Emerson written in October 1843, Margaret Fuller invited his wife, Lydia (Lidian) Jackson Emerson, to take part in her Boston conversations for women, which she had previously attended: “Will not Lidian come to our Conversations this Winter if I get a class [on] the subject Health.”1 Health precarity was a central issue for women in the nineteenth century, and Transcendentalist women writers, who suffered daily from health oppression despite the relative and varying levels of privilege they enjoyed, sought to resist it through activist and pedagogical enterprises.

In the nineteenth-century United States, health care and treatment of illnesses were often not available due to reasons of racialization, scientific racism, enslavement, economic precarity, and gendered and racialized assumptions about health and the experience of pain. During this period, explorations and discussions of health included alternative approaches and ancestral and syncretic practices, advocating for structural changes, and a general rethinking of the relationship of nature and the body to the soul and the spiritual world. Critical thinking about matters of health in the nineteenth century often coincided with discussions on women’s rights, and it lends itself to inquiries from feminist and intersectional perspectives today.

We invite contributions that discuss matters of agency, resistance, empowerment, and emancipation in respect to health and healing in the nineteenth century. We also welcome reflections on the connections that can be drawn across the Atlantic—including both connections that were actively engaged in (via travel or correspondence) and nineteenth-century practices in the Atlantic world in general that address the relationship between the spiritual and the material. Additionally, we encourage contributions on the links between health and literature in relation to academic work, as well as presentations pertaining to feminist/health pedagogical practices.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Transcendentalism, spiritualism, and health
• Transcendentalist debates around self-culture and self-care
• Body and soul in medical debates of the nineteenth century
• Midwifery and gynecology
• Abolitionism and health
• Practices of healing in the U.S. American South during slavery including herbalism, hoodoo, voodoo/voudou
• Indigenous practices of healing
• Socialism and health
• Vegetarianism and health
• Mesmerism / animal magnetism, hypnotism
• Inquiries into the non-conscious and somnambulism
• Disability in nineteenth-century women’s writing
• Feminist phenomenology applied to nineteenth-century discourses around the body, soul, and health
• Mental and physical health in relation to academic life and pedagogical practices

 

Please send paper proposals (350 words) and panel proposals (350 words per paper plus a short framing statement) as well as a short bio containing your affiliation (if any) and contact details to Johanna Pitetti-Heil and Alice de Galzain at criticalhealthconference@gmail.com by 10 February 2025.

The conference will be held at Sorbonne Université. Funding options will be available to support travel and accommodation costs, please get in touch to discuss this with us by e-mail at criticalhealthconference@gmail.com once proposals have been accepted. For those who may not wish to travel, hybrid participation will also be an option.

Attendance fees: 75 EUR for all university staff and professional attendees, free for students and early career researchers.

Further information will be available here: www.criticalhealthconference.wordpress.com