Birkbeck hosts a lively and dynamic programme of regular and special events on the theme of medical humanities. For more details, please follow the links below. You can also search our website for ‘events’.
Reading Group
We hold a regular reading group which meets monthly throughout term time to explore key readings, ideas and materials in the field of medical humanities. Find more information on The Birkbeck Medical Humanities Reading Group page.
Conferences, Workshops and Symposia 2018-2019
For more details of each event, please click on the links provided.
- Lecture: Michael Sappol, Anatomy’s Photography: Showmanship, Objectivity, Transgression – 13 March 2019, 5.30 pm, Keynes Library.
- Screening: Medical Cinema 1918-1965: Films from the collection of the National Library of Medicine – 20 March 2019, 6-9 pm, Birkbeck Cinema.
- Contested Conditions Screening and Discussion Series #1: Safe (Todd Haynes, 1995) and White [Mater]ial: A Video Essay on Todd Haynes’s Safe (Amber Jacobs and Catherine Grant, 2013). 19th October 2018.
- Curating the Medical Humanities: a workshop considering some of the key ethical, intellectual and practical challenges involved in curating medical humanities exhibitions, particularly in relation to questions of audience, accessibility, participation and public engagement. 13th September 2018.
Conferences, Workshops and Symposia 2017-2018
For more details of each event, please click on the links provided.
- The Diagnostic Moment in Cinema: a lunchtime research seminar with Annemarie Jutel & Thierry Jutel. 21st June 2018.
- Stereostopic Visions inside the Laboratory and in the Arts: a lunchtime research seminar with Silvia Casini. 7th June 2018.
- Conceiving Histories exhibition: a collaboration between literary historian, Isabel Davis, and visual artist, Anna Burel; from it emerges creative and fictional reworkings of the archival materials of un-pregnancy. This exhibition re-materialises the past, giving structure and shape to things that have been left to us in text. Peltz Gallery, Birkbeck School of Arts, 8th November – 13th December 2017.
- Putting Theory Into Practice: Exploring the Role of Practice-Based Medical Humanities: A conference exploring how the interrogations and insights of medical humanities actually find their way into the clinic and are made relevant and utilisable to biomedicine and its practitioners, to enhance patient care. 29th-30th November 2017.
Conferences, Workshops and Symposia 2016-17
For more details of each event, please click on the links provided.
- Creative Writing and Mental Health: A new seminar series culminating in a one day conference that asks what can writers and teachers of Creative Writing learn from psychiatry, neuroscience, and other medical disciplines about the links between creativity and mental illness? Friday 28 April – Friday 26 May. Conference Saturday 27 May. Funded by a Birkbeck Wellcome Trust ISSF grant.
- Theatres of Contagion: Infectious Performance: a two-day symposium examining the relationship between theatre and contagion from a range of humanities, medical, psychological and scientific perspectives, via diverse forms including drama, theatre, live art, dance, musical and cultural performance. Birkbeck, 11-12 May 2017. Funded by a Birkbeck Wellcome Trust ISSF grant.
- Fluid Physicalities: Day conference, 10 March 2017. Funded by a Birkbeck Wellcome Trust ISSF grant.
- Healing Spaces: Modern Architecture and the Body.This event marks the publication of the collected volume Healing Spaces, Modern Architecture and the Body, Ashgate Studies in Architecture (Routledge, 2016). Birkbeck, 3 February 2017.
- Breath Catalogue, is a collaborative work by artist-scholars Kate Elswit and Megan Nicely, and data scientist/interaction designer Ben Gimpert, together with composer Daniel Thomas Davis and violist Stephanie Griffin. Presented by Corkscrew: practice based/led research at Birkbeck, 14 November 2016
- Conceiving Histories, a new project lead by Isabel Davis in the department of English and Humanities, is taking part in the Being Human Festival 2016. Birkbeck, 23 November 2016
- ‘What’s Critical About the Critical Medical Humanities?’. Lunchtime lecture with Angela Woods and Anne Whitehead introducing the recently published Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities. Birkbeck, 6 October 2016
Conferences, Workshops and Symposia 2015-16
For more details of each event, please click on the links provided.
- Fluid Physicalities: a new research seminar convened at Birkbeck College and funded by the Wellcome Trust. We will meet throughout 2016 and explore all manner of bodily fluids and their cultural, historical, and phenomenological aspects.
- Medical Objects: An Interdisciplinary Enquiry. Funded by a Wellcome Trust ISSF grant, this project encompasses a medical horror film season and a one-day workshop on 13 July 2016 at Birkbeck’s School of Arts.
- Embarrassing Bodies: Feeling Self-Conscious in the Nineteenth Century. Funded by a Wellcome Trust ISSF grant, this one-day symposium will explore embarrassing moments in the nineteenth century. Friday 17th June 2016, Birkbeck, University of London.
- Victorian Psychology Now. Funded by a Wellcome Trust ISSF grant, this symposium and reading group explores new critical directions for researching Victorian psychology. Friday 9 and Saturday 10 June, Birkbeck, University of London.
- CHASE Medical Humanities Network inaugural workshop. A halfday workshop exploring research connections and postgraduate training provision. 13 May 2016, School of Arts, Birkbeck.
For details of more past events, please click here.
Image above: Open air propaganda Cinemotor, Bermondsey (1938)
Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images, L0074598
