Chères et chers collègues,

J’ai le plaisir de vous communiquer le programme du colloque international « Critical Health: Feminist Perspectives on Health and Well-Being in the Nineteenth-Century United States » qui se tiendra les 17 et 18 octobre 2025 à Sorbonne Université (Salle Liard; Amphi Guizot).

Le programme est accessible sur le site du colloque: www.criticalhealthconference.wordpress.com

L’inscription est gratuite mais obligatoire : www.criticalhealthconference.wordpress.com/registration/

Alice de Galzain, chercheuse post-doctorante, VALE

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Conference Program

Day 1: Friday 17 October 2025 

Location: Salle Liard, Sorbonne Université, 17 rue de la Sorbonne, 75005 Paris 

8:30-8:45 Conference Registration 

8:45-9:00 Opening Remarks 

9:00-10:30 Session 1 Transcendentalist Women and Health: Healing, Advocacy, and Citizenship 

Chair: Thomas Constantinesco (Sorbonne Université) 

• Sonia Di Loreto (University of Torino) The “Regolatrice” and the Doctor: Margaret Fuller and Cristina Trivulzio di Belgiojoso Nursing Citizenship 
• Andrew Wildermuth (University of Erlangen–Nuremberg) “The Great Panacea for All the Disorders in the Universe, Is Love”: Women’s Health and the Penitentiary in Fuller’s Tribune and Child’s Letters from New-York 
• Kate Culkin (City University of New York) Enthroned Cheerfulness: Edith Emerson Forbes’s Experience of and Attitudes towards Illness 

10:30-11:00 Coffee Break (Le Club) 

11:00-12:30 Session 2 Performing Health and Gender: Narratives of the Mind and Body 

Chair: Charlotte Ribeyrol (Sorbonne Université) 

• Carmen Dexl (University of Regensburg) Performing Choreas, Shifting Discourse: Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Medical Science and Modern Dance 
• Carla Plieth (Technical University of Darmstadt) “Vigorous Muscles, Graceful Motions, and Symmetry of Form”: Gendered Perceptions of Female Physical Exercise in 19th-Century American Writing 
• Christina Katopodis (City University of New York) Medical Implications of Margaret Fuller’s Embodied Musical Aesthetics 

12:30-14:00 Lunch (Le Club) 

14:00-15:30 Session 3 Dance, Expressive Movement, and Women’s Health 

Chair: Johanna Pitetti-Heil (Universität zu Köln) 

• Lynn Matlucks Brooks (Franklin & Marshall College) Staging Health: Medical and Balletic Performances in Antebellum Philadelphia 
• Carrie Streeter (Appalachian State University) Creating and Defending “Ladies’ Gymnastics”: Psycho-Physical Culture in a New Era of Citizenship, 1870s-1890s 
• Ambre Emory-Maier (Kent State University) Dancing in America with Ballet’s Burden: The Health Toll and Survival Strategies of 19th-Century Female Dancers 

15:30-16:00 Coffee Break (Le Club) 

16:00-17:30 Keynote by Phyllis Cole (PennState Brandywine) 

“Diagnoses and Meditations: Healthcare in the Personal Writing of Transcendentalist Women” 

Chairs: Alice de Galzain (Sorbonne Université), Johanna Pitetti-Heil (Universität zu Köln) 

17:30-19:00 Art exhibition by Auriane Kolodziej & wine reception (Le Club) 

From 19:00 Conference dinner at L’Annexe de la Petite Périgourdine, 22 rue des Écoles, 75005 Paris 

Day 2: Saturday 18 October 2025 

Location: Amphi Guizot, Sorbonne Université, 17 rue de la Sorbonne, 75005 Paris 

9:30-10:30 Session 4 Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture: Gender, Race, and Health 

Chair: Alice de Galzain (Sorbonne Université) 

• Etta Madden (Missouri State University) What Not to Do: Physician as Anti-Hero in Caroline Crane Marsh’s Letters (1866-73) 
• Andrew Taylor (University of Edinburgh) Sexual Anarchism and the Biopolitics of Free Love in the Writing of Voltairine de Cleyre and Rosa Graul 

10:30-11:00 Coffee Break (Le Club) 

11:00-12:30 Session 5 Gynecology I: Pregnancy, Reproductive Health 

Chair: Fiona McCann (Sorbonne Université) 

• Emma Day (University College London) “If We Could Only Cure Her”: Cure as Conception in Nineteenth Century Gynaecological Surgery 
• Emily Waples (Hiram College) “Radical Remedy”: Mastectomy, Narrative, and Temporality in the Nineteenth-Century United States 
• Hélène Quanquin (Université de Lille) “No greater misfortune can, generally speaking, be entailed upon a married couple, than that of Sterility”: Women’s Infertility and Childlessness as a Contested Site in 19th-Century U.S. Society 

12:30-13:45 Lunch (on your own) 

13:45-15:00 Session 6 Gynecology II: Pregnancy, Reproductive Health 

Chair: Cécile Roudeau (Université Paris Cité) 

• Ariel Silver (Southern Virginia University) “Labor Pains”: Economics, Medicine, and Motherhood for Nineteenth-Century American Women 
• Mary-Grace Albanese (SUNY Binghamton) Midwifery and Women’s Labor in 19th-Century Louisiana 
• Olivia McClary (University of Oxford) “Clean Bodies”: Commercial Contraception, Capitalist Consumption, and Public Hygiene in the Urban Northeast, 1860-1914 

15:15-15:45 Coffee Break (Le Club) 

15:45-17:45 Session 7 Defying Boundaries: Public Health and Feminist Resistance 

Chair: Caroline Hildebrandt (Université Grenoble Alpes) 

• Rachel E. Nolan (Manchester Metropolitan University) Alice Hamilton’s Vulnerability and Resistance: Feminist Public Health at the turn of the Twentieth Century 
• Ariel Little (University of British Columbia) “A Fair Chance for Girls”: Feminist Resistance against Medical Sexism in Nineteenth-Century Co-education Debates 
• Heike Steinhoff (Ruhr-Universität Bochum) “A Thoroughly Healthy Woman”: Female Health, Beauty, and Well-Being in 19th-Century American Advice Literature

17:45-18:00 Closing Remarks