Evidencing Life and Death in the Medical Humanities
DPhil and ECR Work-in-Progress Workshop
20–21 June 2025 | University of Oxford
Deadline for Abstracts: 12 noon, Thursday 15 May 2025
This one and a half-day interdisciplinary workshop invites DPhils and ECRs at the University of Oxford working under the umbrella of medical humanities to share their research in a supportive environment. Those who work on topics concerning health, medicine, and disease from literature, anthropology, history, philosophy, politics, and other humanities and social sciences perspectives are invited to submit abstracts. Discussion will focus on the ways in which life and death are evidenced, understood, and represented in both academic and clinical contexts.
The workshop will include a keynote lecture by Nükhet Varlık, Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University: The Precarious City: New Regimes of Death and Disease in Early Modern Istanbul (open to all, regardless of participation in the workshop).
Themes & Topics
We welcome submissions that engage with, but are not limited to, the following topics:
- Changing perceptions and approaches to evidence in the medical humanities
- The uses of evidence in the professionalization of health systems
- The authority of evidence in engendering / inhibiting interdisciplinary work in the medical humanities
- Experience and measures of the quality of life
- Definitions of good life and wellbeing in cross-cultural contexts
- Narrative approaches to understanding and representing life and death
- Ageing and the measurement of age
- The role of literature, film, and visual culture in shaping perceptions of life, death, and dying
- Medical, scientific, and cultural responses to the dying and dead body
Submission Guidelines
Please submit an abstract (max. 250 words) and brief academic biography to medhum@torch.ox.ac.uk by 15 May 2025.
Organizers: Hande Altinay; Eleanor Kerfoot; Yuxin Peng.
Medical Humanities Hub, TORCH Research Hubs
