Les archives hors des sentiers battus

Archives out of the Box: Innovating Methods for Critical and Creative Praxis


Call for Participants


8-9th December, University of Manchester, UK

We invite PGR and ECR applicants to our ESRC-funded methods workshop exploring critical, more-than-human, decolonial, multimodal, community-oriented approaches to archiving. Combining historical perspectives from Human Geography, Anthropology, and the Environmental Humanities, this two-day workshop will help participants translate theoretical insights into practical methodological tools and think with archives “outside of the box”.

Participants are invited to present an "archival puzzle": an object, image, absence, or contradiction that has challenged their archival journey. For instance, disruptive more-than-human agents or colonial planning failures might reveal how material conditions or marginalised actors shape social conditions but are hard to map using conventional archival practices.

How might we develop methodological practices and tools that attune us to these unaccounted-for forces, silences, and marginalised voices? How do we train ourselves to listen to and bring unruly archives to the fore?

Two themes of Archives Otherwise and Archiving as Future-Making will be explored in the workshop. The two-day event includes a keynote address by Dr Adom Philogene Heron (University of Bristol), a panel discussion with Professor Alison Browne (University of Manchester), Professor Deidre McKay (Keele University) and Dr Sally Cawood (Lancaster University) and a workshop with a local initiative to learn about community archiving centring marginalised histories. The workshop will conclude with hands-on exploration of multimodal methods to support participants in producing a zine to reflect on key themes.

How to apply: Please send us 250 words about your archival puzzle: what it is, where you encountered it, why it engaged you, and indicate some questions it brought up about silences, forces or actors. You may include up to 4 images which might show the object itself or gesture toward an absence or contradiction. We look forward to receiving your submission to archivesoutofthebox@manchester.ac.uk by 30th September and will confirm your place by 15th October.

Food is provided and includes a shared evening meal. Participants are encouraged to apply to their funder for travel and accommodation costs. We do however have a limited number of travel bursaries for applicants without funding access. Please indicate in your application if you require funding.

The event is organised by Purva Dewoolkar, Sharan Kaur, Uttara Narayan, Arianna Tozzi, at the University of Manchester.

This event is supported by the ESRC through Methods North West and the NWSSDTP.

Peset Llorca fellowships

Peset Llorca fellowships

Call for applications


The Peset Llorca fellowships are addressed to researchers in the field of the history of science, technology and medicine to develop research projects using the collections of the "Vicent Peset Llorca" Library and/or the Museum of the History of Medicine and Science of the López Piñero Interuniversity Institute at the University of Valencia (IILP-UV)


Deadline for the submission of applications: 1 October 2026

Duration: 1 or 2 weeks


Requirements: Doctorate (or advanced doctoral studies). Research on a topic with links with the research projects of the IILP or with the IILP-UV collections. The Peset Llorca researchers will present the results of their research in one of the seminars series or in teaching and dissemination activities of the IILP-UV.

Funding: Intended for accommodation expenses in the Rector Peset Hall of Residence (or similar) for a maximum period of two weeks. The amount awarded will depend on the duration, economic availability and the number of grants granted in the call.

The recipients of the grants will have a workspace at the IILP-UV, a library card (with access to the "Vicent Peset Llorca" Library and all the libraries of the University of Valencia), access to the collections of the Museum of the History of Medicine and Science of the IILP-UV, and to the electronic resources of the University of Valencia.


Instructions:

Candidates must submit:

1.- Complete curriculum vitae. 

2.- Research project (around 500-600 words), indicating its relationship with the "Vicent Peset Llorca" library, with the collections of the Museum of the History of Medicine and Science or with activities carried out at the López Piñero Interuniversity Institute.

3.- Approximate dates of the stay.

The documents (in PDF) must be submitted by email with the subject "Vicent Peset Llorca Grants" before 1 October 2026 to the following two addresses:

Ximo Guillem <Ximo.Guillem@uv.es>
María Ricós <m.carmen.ricos@uv.es>

IMPORTANT: The documentation must be sent to both email addresses.

Les chrétiens de Sogdiane

Sogdian Christians. Networks, Books, Homilies, and Medicine
 

Daniel Sheridan




Brepols
Pages: 210 p.
Size:210 x 297 mm
Illustrations:39 col., 2 tables b/w., 2 maps color
Language(s):English
Publication Year:2026

After centuries of obscurity, the Sogdian people have once again been recognized as the premier long-distance traders of the famed Eurasian trade routes of late antique and early medieval Eurasia, popularly referred to as the “Silk Roads.” Similarily, a previous Christian association with Sogdians and their language had also been all but forgotten until the archeological finds at the turn of the twentieth century. Drawing on a wide range of evidence, this study explores some of the results of Sogdian Christians having once moved within a confluence of networks, with connections to the wider Christian world and the transcontinental trading networks of the Sogdians. Furthermore, extant evidence shows the once wide-spread currency of the Sogdian language among Christians throughout Central Asia. Through the case studies of book culture, knowledge transmission, and the healing arts, the prominence of the “Sogdian element” in Christian activities outside of the Roman world becomes readily apparent not just for the history of Christianity but also the histories of Central Asia, China, and others.

L’éternel retour de l’hystérie

L’éternel retour de l’hystérie


Julia Legrand 



Amsterdam
Septembre 2026

« Hystérique » est désormais une blessure ; pourtant, l'usage du terme persiste dans le champ médical et psychologique. Telle est la curieuse situation dont Julia Legrand propose dans cet ouvrage d'éclairer les ressorts. Retraçant la genèse de cette catégorie et l'histoire de sa consolidation, elle montre comment le développement de son utilisation comme blessure sexiste dans le sens commun a abouti dans les années 1970 à sa suppression des classifications officielles, sans autant conduire à son abandon. En effet, les troubles borderlines et histrioniques lui ont simplement été substitués, si bien que pratique, l'étiquette demeure utilisée pour désigner une forme de « folie douce » et disqualifier la parole des femmes – quand bien elle ne serait même plus accolée de manière exclusive. Analysant ce psyque cette continuité révèle de l'état de la psychanalyse et de la la psychanalyse chiatrie, l'aune trice interroge en outre la réappropriation de la figure de l'hystérique par les mouvements féministes, d'abord comme outil de lutte contre la réduction au silence et la pathologisation de colères politiques. Elle livre ainsi une réflexion originale sur les conditions et les limites d'une démarche plébiscitée dans les milieux militants : le retournement du stigmate.

Donner la vie entre le Moyen Âge et le début de l'époque moderne

The Wonders of Childbirth. Giving Life between the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period
 

Alessandra Foscati

Published 27 August 2026
Pub. Location London
Imprint Routledge
Pages 198
ISBN 9781003631934


Childbirth has long been a subject that defies easy historical investigation – elusive, painful, enveloped in modesty and mystery, and resistant to disclosure. This book outlines how childbirth was described and represented in the West from the Middle Ages through the early modern period to the seventeenth century, before the medicalisation of obstetrical practice and the emergence of clinics.

Drawing on a wide and varied body of sources – including medical, legal, religious, and literary texts – the author reconstructs the practices associated with women in labour. As the focal point of collective attention, the parturient was surrounded by other women – midwives, relatives, and neighbours – reflecting the strong female solidarity fostered by childbirth, while also being attended by men such as her husband, a priest, and, in later periods, a surgeon. Adopting a broad diachronic perspective, the book highlights both elements of long-term continuity and the most significant changes in the early modern period.

The book is intended for a wide readership, while also serving the interests of scholars and students. Beyond those concerned with the history of childbirth, midwifery and women, it will be relevant to readers engaged in the history of medicine, cultural anthropology and cultural history.

 

Pratiques et usages des archives médicales

 

Repenser l'histoire de la lèpre dans la Méditerranée médiévale

Beyond Contagion. Rethinking the History of Leprosy in the Medieval Mediterranean


CSMBR Upcoming Lecture by Anna Gili


22 September 2026 – 5 PM (CET)


Given the variety of its pathological manifestations, leprosy was difficult for physicians in the past to recognise. They attempted to provide different pathological descriptions, distinct aetiologies, and varied clinical portraits to grasp its nature. Even the proposed treatments, although often influenced by the Galenic discovery of theriac, show considerable variation.

This talk explores some of the texts composed in the medieval Arabic, Latin, and Greek worlds that sought to capture this multifaceted pathology, with the aim of providing a commentary that goes beyond the narrow focus on contagion typical of scholarship on the subject.

Drawing on my recent book Leprosy in the Mediterranean Medical Literature (De Gruyter, 2025), I examine these texts through the combined lenses of philology and the history of medicine to reconstruct a history of leprosy that is, at the same time, a history of authors, texts, translations, and cultural exchanges.

At the centre of the talk will be al-Majūsī’s Kitāb al-Malakī, a work that both draws upon and goes beyond antique and late antique doctrines on the nature and treatment of the disease. This text will be placed in dialogue with earlier Arabic works such as Sarābiyūn’s Compendium, al-Ṭabarī’s al-Muʿālajāt al-Buqrāṭiyya, and al-Zahrāwī’s Kitāb al-Taṣrīf.

I will then turn to the Latin and Greek translations of the Kitāb al-Malakī to examine how the Arabic author’s biologically grounded, non-moralising approach to the disease was conveyed by its translators.


To register for this event, please click here.

Représentations populaires et biomédicales de l'intérieur du corps

Inside/Insight: Popular and biomedical representations and the aesthetics of the inner body


Call for papers

Düsseldorf, 6-8 April 2027

Organisers: Michaela Clark (Düsseldorf); Heiner Fangerau (Düsseldorf); Arno Görgen (Bern); Stefan Höltgen (Bonn)

Since the twentieth century, understandings of the human body have increasingly shifted from seeing it as a stable organic object to a malleable entity produced by socio-political conditions, popular beliefs, and technological intervention. In particular, the body’s interior – long concealed from direct observation – serves as a site of cultural imagination and biopolitical negotiation mediated through photography, film, medical imaging technologies, and digital forms of visualisation and simulation. Across scientific and popular media alike, representations of the inner body shape understandings of corporeality, health and illness, as well as both individual and social identity.

The conference Inside/Insight explores the body’s interior as a culturally charged and imaginative space in which questions of visibility and invisibility, knowledge and evidence, affect and aesthetics, and power and body politics converge. Photographic practices, medical teaching films, and documentaries establish distinctive visual regimes that produce scientific authority while shaping pedagogical engagement and eliciting affective experiences. However, such imagery also forms a significant part of popular culture: horror in film and video games radically expose the inner body, transforming biomedical visuality into grotesque and even monstrous sights. These media practices negotiate cultural fears, desires, and concepts of bodily boundaries while challenging distinctions between the normal and the pathological. Both scientific and popular depictions of corporeal space are thus infused with body politics and biopolitics. In its imagining, the anatomised body emerges as a space that can be regulated, optimised, and normalised, revealing broader structures of power. Questions of gender and sexuality are equally central: biomedical and popular cultural representations can reproduce and reinforce or deconstruct and destabilize bodily norms.

The conference focuses on the diverse media forms and representational practices through which internal bodily spaces are made visible and thereby rendered open to intervention. We are interested both in the ways the interior spaces of the body are produced as an object of scientific knowledge and in its staging as a site onto which cultural anxieties, desires and hopes are projected and negotiated. It seeks to further examine technologies of visualisation and simulation that do not merely represent the body’s interior but actively produce it through performative media practices. These include digital media and gaming formats that translate complex physiological processes into interactive models for education, training, and public engagement.

By bringing together these heterogeneous media practices, the conference addresses current debates in media studies, game studies, and the medical humanities. It asks how imaginaries of the human body have developed historically, how they operate aesthetically, and what epistemic status they occupy at the intersection of science, art, and popular culture.

We look forward to contributions from scholars, artists, and practitioners working across the humanities, social sciences, medicine, media studies, visual culture, and the arts. The conference is designed to encourage interdisciplinary dialogue across fields. Theoretical, historical, empirical, artistic and practice-based approaches, as well as case studies, performance, and comparative perspectives are welcome.

Possible genres, media, and topics include (but are not limited to):

· Visualisations of the body’s interior in medicine and the human sciences

· Medical aesthetics and the clinical gaze

· Photography, film, comics, and video

· Body horror, horror cinema, and splatter film

· Documentary and mockumentary

· Science fiction and fantasy

· Pornography and eroticism

· True Crime and crime film

· Video games and serious games

· Sound and sonic representations of the body’s interior

· Memes and digital popular culture

· Fine art, installation art, performance art

· Gender, sexuality, and the male gaze

· Disgust, affect, and emotion

· Violence

· Ethics and aesthetics

· (Eco-)feminist perspectives

· Biopsychosocial perspectives on the body

· Lookmaxxing and bodily optimisation

· Biopolitics, body politics, and technologies of the body

· Visualisation, simulation, and digital body models
 

 

Presentation format

· 20-minute presentations

· Papers may be presented in English or German

Please submit the following as a PDF of MS Word (.doc/.docx) file here by 1 November 2026:

· an abstract (maximum 350 words)

· a short academic CV

· the abstract and short CV together should not exceed one page.

For questions feel free to reach out to michaela.clark@med.uni-duesseldorf.de.

We look forward to welcoming you to Düsseldorf!