Critical Health: Feminist Perspectives on Health and Well-Being in the
Nineteenth-Century United States
Paris, France, October 17-18, 2025
Deadline: 10 Feb. 2025
Contact: criticalhealthconference@gmail.com
Further information will be available at:
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Conference Organizers: Dr. Alice de Galzain (Sorbonne Université) and
Dr. habil. Johanna Pitetti-Heil (Universität zu Köln)
Call for Papers:
In a letter addressed to Ralph Waldo Emerson written in October 1843,
Margaret Fuller invited his wife, Lydia (Lidian) Jackson Emerson, to
take part in her Boston conversations for women, which she had
previously attended: “Will not Lidian come to our Conversations this
Winter if I get a class [on] the subject Health.”1 Health precarity
was a central issue for women in the nineteenth century, and
Transcendentalist women writers, who suffered daily from health
oppression despite the relative and varying levels of privilege they
enjoyed, sought to resist it through activist and pedagogical
enterprises.
In the nineteenth-century United States, health care and treatment of
illnesses were often not available due to reasons of racialization,
scientific racism, enslavement, economic precarity, and gendered and
racialized assumptions about health and the experience of pain. During
this period, explorations and discussions of health included
alternative approaches and ancestral and syncretic practices,
advocating for structural changes, and a general rethinking of the
relationship of nature and the body to the soul and the spiritual
world. Critical thinking about matters of health in the nineteenth
century often coincided with discussions on women’s rights, and it
lends itself to inquiries from feminist and intersectional
perspectives today.
We invite contributions that discuss matters of agency, resistance,
empowerment, and emancipation in respect to health and healing in the
nineteenth century. We also welcome reflections on the connections
that can be drawn across the Atlantic—including both connections that
were actively engaged in (via travel or correspondence) and
nineteenth-century practices in the Atlantic world in general that
address the relationship between the spiritual and the material.
Additionally, we encourage contributions on the links between health
and literature in relation to academic work, as well as presentations
pertaining to feminist/health pedagogical practices.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
– Transcendentalism, spiritualism, and health
– Transcendentalist debates around self-culture and self-care
– Body and soul in medical debates of the nineteenth century
– Midwifery and gynecology
– Abolitionism and health
– Practices of healing in the U.S. American South during slavery
including herbalism, hoodoo, voodoo/voudou
– Indigenous practices of healing
– Socialism and health
– Vegetarianism and health
– Mesmerism / animal magnetism, hypnotism
– Inquiries into the non-conscious and somnambulism
– Disability in nineteenth-century women’s writing
– Feminist phenomenology applied to nineteenth-century discourses
around the body, soul, and health
– Mental and physical health in relation to academic life and
pedagogical practices
Please send paper proposals (350 words) and panel proposals (350 words
per paper plus a short framing statement) as well as a short bio
containing your affiliation (if any) and contact details to Johanna
Pitetti-Heil and Alice de Galzain at
criticalhealthconference@gmail.com by 10 February 2025.
The conference will be held at Sorbonne Université. Funding options
will be available to support travel and accommodation costs, please
get in touch to discuss this with us by e-mail at
criticalhealthconference@gmail.com once proposals have been accepted.
For those who may not wish to travel, hybrid participation will also
be an option.
Attendance fees: 75 EUR for all university staff and professional
attendees, free for students and early career researchers.
Further information will be available here:
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