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