Les cultures médico-textuelles françaises

French Medico-Textual Cultures

Call for Papers

Queen’s University Belfast, 9–10 March 2018

Confirmed Keynote Speakers: Prof. Holly Tucker (Vanderbilt) and Dr Larry Duffy (Kent)

The aim of this conference is to consider the reciprocal influence of French and francophone medical and cultural texts in shaping popular and professional understandings of illness, disease and the patient experience. We invite proposals for papers focussing on the ways in which French cultural texts (literature, film, graphic novel, blog, documentary...) engage with developments in medical research, as well as the role played by cultural texts in representing the pathogenic origins, contagious action and lived reality of a wide range of diseases from the early-modern period to the present day.

Questions to be addressed include:

• How do medical and cultural texts develop a mutually-reinforcing understanding of illness and disease?

• How is disease textually transmitted across genres and disciplinary boundaries?

• How do first-person narratives of illness engage with medical texts or theories, and vice-versa?

• How do cultural representations of disease influence medical and scientific concepts of health and disease, and vice-versa?

• In what ways do cultural texts comment on the patient experience of national healthcare systems and their potential flaws?

• How do physician-writers use cultural texts to engage the public in the work that they do?

Proposals of c. 250 words for 20-minute papers (in French or English) that deal with any aspect of the above questions should be emailed to the conference organiser, Dr Steven Wilson (steven.wilson@qub.ac.uk), by Friday 24 November 2017.

This event is supported by the British Academy and the Modern Languages Core Disciplinary Research Group at Queen’s.