Concepts of Infection - an interdisciplinary conference
Thursday 29th March to Saturday 31st March 2007
at the University of Bristol
This Conference will explore the ways in which infections are
imagined, represented, and theorized. Presentations will engage with
a wide variety of aspects of infection, from historical examples of
single diseases and epidemics (such as cholera, smallpox, AIDS), to
more abstract concepts of pollution and contagion. Topics covered
include, among others: the development of our scientific
understanding of infectious disease; the ways in which ideas of
infection relate to race, gender, sexuality, imagination and
conceptions of the body and of the self; the language of infection
and its use as metaphor; how real and imagined diseases are
represented in literature, film, painting, and book illustration; and
the way in which discourses of infection are employed for political,
psychological, and polemical purposes.
The Conference is interdisciplinary, aiming to be of interest to
those from the humanities and the sciences.
Web: <http://www.bris.ac.uk/philosophy/department/events/
Infection_conference/index.html>
Speakers and titles
Keynotes
Sander Gilman
Emory University
Fantasies of infection
Helen King
University of Reading
From the plague of Athens to menotoxin: the interactions between
ancient and modern concepts of infection
Histories of Infection
Michael Worboys
University of Manchester
Was there a bacteriological revolution in late 19thC medicine?
Clark Lawlor
Northumbria University
Consumption and infection: from romantic disease to tuberculosis
Thomas Ruetten
University of Newcastle
Placing Venice on the map of cholera: The visitation of 1911
The Politics of Metaphor
Johannes Türk
Indiana University, Bloomington
"Exposer la vie" The emergence of the powers of immunity
Uwe Schütte
Aston University
The "plague" as a metaphor — Kleist, Girard, and the masking of violence
Sean de Koekkoek
University of Leiden
Infectious metaphor: Figurative language and disease(d) discourse
Imagination and Desire
Yvonne Wübben
Freie Universität, Berlin
Contagious thoughts. Metaphors of infection in psychopathology around
1900
Laura Balladur
Bates College
Infecting Imagination: Malebranche and reproduction
Jane Kingsley-Smith
Roehampton University
‘Plague of those Cupids!’: Erotic infection in English renaissance
tragedy
Infection and Enlightenment
Heiko Pollmeier
Berlin
The French debate on smallpox inoculation (1754-1774)
Johannes Endres
Universität Leipzig and Universität Saarbrücken
Infection and security
Simon Kenrick
UCLA
Magic over medicine: The subversion of Enlightenment science in Gros’
Napoleon in the Plague House at Jaffa, 1804
Culture and Disease
Roger Cooter and Claudia Stein
UCL/Warwick
Coming into focus: Posters, power, and visual culture in the history
of medicine
Nelya Koteyko and Brigitte Nerlich
University of Nottingham
MRSA - Portrait of a superbug: A media drama in three acts (1995-2005)
Anja Laukötter
Institute for the History of Medicine, Charité, Berlin
Science in film — film in science: the "Pocken" Film, 1920
Classical Concepts of Contagion
Elisabeth Hsu
ISCA/Green College, Oxford
Worms and dragons and other creatures causing illness: ideas of
infection in ancient and medieval Chinese medicine
Justo Hernandez and Luis Pino-Campos
University of La Laguna
On the original concepts of epidemic and plague and its
misinterpretations
Jennifer Cooke
University of Sussex
‘An infectious example’: Oedipus the Pharmakos and the psychoanalytic
plague
Boundaries and Nations
Jennifer Kapczynski
Washington University
"Sick of guilt: Fascism and constructions of collective illness in
postwar German culture"
Zoe Anderson
University of Western Australia
A healthy constitution: Infection, ethnicity and the Australian body
politic
Helen Lambert
Department of Social Medicine, University of Bristol
Dealing with time-bound illness: Contagion and pollution in north India
Governing Images
Michael Bresalier
HPS, University of Cambridge and Philosophy, Bristol
Globalizing 'flu
Rachel Robson/ Jaime Gassmann
University of Kansas
Militaristic language in microbiology textbooks
Stephen Wallace
Peninsula College
A social history of infection
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